Careful with my words, they’ll cost you dearly…
Posted in Advertising, Copyright on October 8th, 2007 by Eric FranklinI saw a comment piece over at The Guardian entitled “You can’t use the O-word” and was persuaded to click through. What was this mysterious “O” word? First thought? “Oprah.” Yeah, that has to be it, she’s got a big name and needs to protect it. Then I thought, maybe this has nothing to do with trademark and everything to do with censorship. “Orgasm.” Yeah, that must be it.
Even before the resulting commentary could load, I was experiencing negative emotions about the word - most likely a legitimate word with legitimate literary associations that was about to be removed from that pool of words we can all liberally use. As it turns out, the word is “Olympics,” especially if you use it conjunction with “2012″ as a title. I kid you not.
How did we come to this? I doubt the original organization committee of the Olympic Games cared much about where their moniker was used. In fact, that’s probably what passed as “word-of-mouth” advertising. Somehow, however, now that we’ve reached a time and place where the Olympics truly are the world games, somebody (or at least certain entities) seems interested in controlling these associations. I guess nobody wants to hear about “Jihad at the [insert trademarked phrase here] Games” or “Terror Strikes the [insert trademarked phrase here] Games.”
I keep wondering what can be done about the privatization of language (and if you have thoughts on it, please eel free to add them in the comments section below). It seems too steep a cost for artists to produce meaningful and the be required to change it, often in substantive ways so that private and corporate interests are protected. The worst part of all of this is that the self-censorship has already begun. You will never see a murder novel entitled “The Cleaning Company [facial tissue brand] Killings.” What a shame.