The Problem with Trademark Grammar
Linguistics 120: Structure of English Grammar
Jeffrey Carl Faden

Table of Contents
1.	Introduction
2.	INTA Specifications
3.	Problems with trademark grammar
1.	Adjectives
2.	Singular vs. plural
3.	Possessive vs. non-possessive
4.	Verbs
5.	Designation
4.	Conclusion
5.	Works Cited

1. Introduction
	When the average person sits down at their computer with the intent to find information, they open up their web browser, type a few words into their search engine, and discover what they're looking for. Indeed, when the culprit is asked what they have just done, they might reply, “I just Googled for something.” When asked what program they used to do such a thing, they might reply, “I used IE.” When asked what the program ran on, they might reply, “On my Dell.” Are sirens going off yet? While this might seem like a harmless everyday activity, corporations and their hired grammarians know that these everyday people are up to something exceedingly more insidious: trademark misuse.
	According to Google, Microsoft, and Dell – and their big friend, the International Trademark Association – this average person is, in fact, contributing to the demise of their trademarks. What Joe Average should have said was that he used his Dell™ Dimension® desktop computer to run the Microsoft® Internet Explorer® internet browser to navigate to the Google™ search engine and perform a Google Web Search™ (Dell, Microsoft, Google). When they state that they are Googling using IE on their Dell, they are committing “genericide” – heartlessly abbreviating and otherwise misusing terms, which then propel them into mainstream vernacular, making them generic – meaning they are no longer recognized by law as trademarks, or names that belong to their respective companies, and competitors are free to use them.
2. INTA specifications
	INTA briefs companies on tactics that will help them enforce their trademarks. First , they provide companies with a scale that determines how suitable words are as trademarks. The strongest words are known as "fanciful marks" – made-up words with no relation to the good, such as Google. Next come “arbitrary marks,” which are existing words that still hold no relation to the good, such as Adobe. After that comes “suggestive marks,” which suggest a relation to the good, such as Microsoft (originally an abbreviation of “microcomputer software”). Weaker, still, are “descriptive marks,” which ultimately describe the good, such as Pizza Hut (although some might argue that the usage of “hut” is more suggestive than truthful). At the bottom of the scale are generic terms, which act as descriptors for goods, such as “desktop computer,” “internet browser,” or “search engine.” (International Trademark Association, “Trademarks vs. Generic Terms”).
	Furthermore, INTA provides guidelines on proper use of trademarks. In some PowerPoints (that is, Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation files) on its site are explicit rules (International Trademark Association, “Trademark Proper Use”). The presentation begins by stating that trademarks are “proper adjectives” which modify the generic term for the actual good or service, which it must immediately precede. This would mean that words such as “Kleenex” or “Kodak” are in fact adjectives, which modify words like “tissue” or “camera.”
	The first set of slides explains that singular trademarks should not be pluralized. For example, names such as “Gillette” or “Nintendo” can't refer to a number of objects – besides, according to INTA, they should be adjectives. So talking about a case of Gillettes or a room of Nintendos is frowned upon. In a similar light, pluralized trademarks cannot be singularized. If one were to ask for a single piece of candy, they would have to ask for a piece of Hershey's Kisses candy. If one were to ask for multiple pieces, they would still have to ask for Hershey's Kisses candies. A single “Kiss” is out of the question.
	The slides continue, stating that non-possessive trademarks should not be used in the possessive form: instead of referring to a Reebok's comfort, one should refer to a Reebok sneaker's comfort. But if the trademark is already possessive, the speaker is in luck, as they can refer to Levi'sjeans – although since the trademark is also an “adjective,” they need to refer to a Levi's pair of jeans.
	Next, the slides emphasize that trademarks should not be verbs. You can't Google for something, you can't go Jet-Skiing, you can't Spam, you can't Xerox a document, you can't TiVo that show, you can't Hoover your boss, you can't go Rollerblading, and you certainly cannot an image. Besides, we're dealing with “adjectives” here. When's the last time you stupided anything?
	INTA presents methods to make trademarks stand out from regular text so they are not mistaken as generic terms – for example, by putting them in all capitals, bolding them, surrounding them in quotation marks, or printing them in a different color. This would place focus on the trademark itself, rather than the generic term, supposedly informing people that the trademark is not part of the name of the product as an object, but something that simply specifies which brand of product it is.
	And in all cases, INTA states that product, good, and company names should be followed by either a TMor SMsymbol, denoting their status as a trademark, or a ® symbol, denoting their status as registered trademarks. If impossible to write these symbols (for example, the trademark is spoken), one must declare somewhere in the media that the word is a registered trademark of whatever company. In addition, companies can insert the word “brand” within the trademark and the generic term, although they do not specify what part of speech that is supposed to be.
	This prescriptive thinking is only due to INTA's original intent: to prevent confusion in the market, and direct all revenue to the trademark holders. Their intent is not to warp the face of the English language and obscure its basic tenets beyond recognition – quite the contrary, they want to keep it regimented and static. But doing the latter directly results in the former. By continuing to emphasize trademarks and push them upon consumers in advertising and other company media, the names are prone to market saturation. If the good has unique traits or is known as the dominant name within its market, its trademarks' chances of becoming generic are high, despite the amount of effort that INTA and individual companies put toward preserving it.
3. Problems with trademark grammar
	are grammatical problems with every single rule that INTA puts forth to preserve trademarks. Its statement that trademarks are adjectives is false. Its remarks about singular, plural, and possessive trademarks are flawed, and go against patterns of natural speech. Preventing words from becoming verbs defies the basic tenets of linguistic evolution. And placing special marks after company names is yet another thing that companies themselves barely ever adhere to. I will analyze each rule in depth, and show how INTA's specifications do not mirror reality.
3.1 Adjectives
	INTA posits that trademarks are always proper adjectives, in that they take an initial capital letter and refer to a specific person, place, language, or organized group. As adjectives, trademarks are expected to modify the generic term that follows it. While trademarks do specify what company and brand name the product has, they do not modify it in the same sense that adjectives do. If they were, in fact, adjectives, the structure of “Microsoft Windows Vista operating system” would follow that of (1).
Figure 1
	This structure suggests that the trademark “Microsoft” is an adjunct of the trademark “Windows Vista,” which is an adjunct of “operating system.” While it makes sense that “Microsoft” and “Windows Vista” describe the type of operating system, the claim that each trademark is a separate adjective, adjunct to the following one, would open the grammar up to problems such as the one shown in (2).
Figure 2
	If it is in the nature of adjectives to adjoin to one another, wouldn't it still be grammatical to stick the adjective “unstable” between the two words? There must be another plausible explanation as to why “Microsoft” and “Windows Vista” must precede “operating system.”
	Even more worrying is the fact that the actual number of instances in which companies use trademarks as “adjectives” is quite slim. If we are to visit Microsoft Windows's website, we see trademarks all over the place: “Windows” and its logo in one corner, phrases such as “Are you ready for Windows Vista?” and “See what Windows Vista can do,” and nouns other than the supposed “generic term” that is supposed to follow it, such as “Windows Vista partner products” and “Windows Vista license discount.” “Microsoft” does not appear once in the body of the page. But more surprisingly, “operating system” does not appear at all. (Microsoft)
	The designated generic term for Windows Vista is nowhere to be found. Might this mean that the “adjective” Windows Vista can precede other noun phrases, such as “partner product” or “license discount?” Might this mean that Microsoft is advertising their operating system with ungrammatical sentences?
Figure 3
Are we to believe that the adjective, “Windows Vista,” has unrightfully taken the place of the subject location within the verb phrase? All of this is false. Microsoft is simply using the “Windows Vista” trademark the way any normal person would use it – as a noun.
	Trademarks are nouns. Perhaps they might not be tangible objects, but they are still nouns. Even if followed by a generic term, they do not modify it the way an adjective would. What INTA means to say is that trademarks are nouns which should be used as attributive modifiers. (Pullum) If this is the case, our Windows example would appear as it does in (4).
Figure 4
3.2 Singular vs. plural
	Distinguishing between singular and plural trademarks can be very problematic. There are good intentions behind the distinction, though. By defining trademarks as “adjectives,” INTA defies all logic that is used to categorize parts of speech – so marking certain “adjectives” as singular or plural, while not adhering to basic ideas about the English language, is perfectly reasonable. The truth is, in the same way that trademarks are used as nouns by the companies which are told otherwise, the same companies swap grammatical numbers all of the time.
	The Hershey's Kisses website is quite adherent to the rules set forth by INTA, in the midst of some being unable to follow (Hershey's). “KISSES” always functions as the modifier for another term, sometimes has “brand” following the trademark, always capitalized, and has a ® symbol following the trademarks on the page least once each. It is ironic, therefore, that the Hershey Company had to register a separate trademark to simply include the phrase, “Say it with a KISS”TM. The mixed message sent by the Hershey Company can be shown in the Wikipedia article for Kisses, which, until recently, was titled “Hershey's Kiss.” Those who had written the article assumed that treating the name as singular, as is the norm for Wikipedia articles, was perfectly fine. The article still does not adhere to INTA's policy of putting generic terms after the name, but let's leave that up to someone who cares. (Wikipedia, “'s Kisses”)
	The LEGO Group is another example of a company which tries to strictly adhere to INTA's specifications, and aggressively protect its own trademarks. Its last standing LEGO patent expired in 1988 (CBC News), but despite other competitors moving in on its interlocking brick technology, trademarks can be kept forever, as long as LEGO makes sure to protect them. One almost embarrassing display of trademark anxiety is the domain http://www.legos.com. Upon visiting the domain, the visitor would receive this notice:
“The word LEGO is a brand name, and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our products as “LEGO bricks or toys” and not “LEGOS.” By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud, and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you!” (Wikipedia, “Image:Lego website brand name notice.png”)
The visitor would then be redirected to http://www.lego.com. While it is true that “LEGOS” is not a registered trademark (USPTO), it is ridiculous for the LEGO Group to assume that a consumer's mention of “Legos” instead of “LEGO bricks and toys” is detrimental to the brand, and even more ridiculous to impose rules like this on consumers. What might be most ridiculous of all, though, is the purchase of the domain name, if the LEGO Group is so bent on distancing itself from pluralization of its trademark.
3.3 Possessive vs. non-possessive
	The possessive construction in English is made of a series of determiner phrases specifying the next, each of which consists of a determiner, and then a complement such as a noun phrase, or a larger clause. There is no known case, though, where the complement can be an adjective. Since INTA claims that trademarks which have been registered as possessive must stay possessive, while those which are singular must stay singular, let's take the trademark “Levi's” (which, of course, is an “adjective”) and see how it is expected to work as possessive in (5).
Figure 5
Putting aside for the moment the observation that this seems completely wrong, let's remember another constraint that INTA has posed: trademarks must immediately precede the generic term they modify. In this case, the trademark seems to be a complement of a null determiner, which specifies another determiner and its complement. It does not immediately precede it, nor does it act, in the slightest, as an adjective.
	Of course, for non-possessive trademarks, like “Pepsi,” referring to them in the possessive is not allowed, which is often quite difficult when its generic term cannot be found following the trademark anywhere on the entire site. (Pepsi) “Pepsi” used in the possessive form can be found, though, by just Googling “Pepsi” and looking at the first result, (6).
Figure 6
On a side note, Pepsi's generic term is “cola,” which is ironic given that the term “cola” was originally trademarked by the Coca-Cola Company. (International Trademark Association, “Trademark Proper Use”) This means that INTA would not object to “cola” being used in the possessive form, and serving as the generic term for other trademarks.

3.4 Verbs
	One of the most discussed trademark misuses in recent time is the phenomenon of deriving trademarks into verbs. The verb is used to describe the action that one usually takes while using the product or service that the trademark describes. There are many commonly used terms which are still registered trademarks, but are in danger of becoming generic trademarks, according to INTA, due to their misuse:
●	FedEx – pertains to the FedEx Corporation. It means to send something by overnight courier, e.g. “I need to fedex this package.”
●	Google – pertains to Google Inc. It means to run a query using an Internet search engine, e.g. “I Googled 'trademark',” “I googled for 'trademark',” or just “I googled.”
●	Hoover – pertains to the Hoover Company. While the company sells vacuum cleaners, the term is slang for sucking up to something, e.g. “I hoovered my boss.”
●	Jet-Ski – a brand of personal watercrafts by Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd. It means to use any kind of personal watercraft, e.g. “Let's go jetskiing.”
●	Photoshop – a name of image editing software by Adobe Systems. It means to manipulate something using a graphics editor, e.g. “Some guy photoshopped this image.”
●	Rollerblade – a series of inline skates by Nordica S.P.A. It means to use inline skates, e.g. “I went rollerblading yesterday.”
●	Spam – a name for canned meat by the Hormel Foods Corporation. Its definition is completely different, in fact taken from a Monty Python sketch about an overabundance of Spam being served at a diner (Templeton) – meaning to send unsolicited email, e.g. “I got spammed 100 times yesterday.”
●	Xerox – pertains to the Xerox Corporation. It means to photocopy something, e.g. “Go xerox 50 copies of this document.”
	The formation of these words is an interesting example of derivation, where a much larger phrase is replaced by the trademark that often represents it. Some are transitive, while others are not. Some take complements other than nouns, such as the word “Google” in some cases, which, while used to replace “search,” can take a prepositional phrase, as shown in (7).
Figure 7
 	INTA has alternative suggestions to these uses. For example, instead of “could you xerox the report?” they suggest “could you use the Xerox® copier to make six copies?” Or instead of “I would like to go rollerblading,” they suggest “Bring your Rollerblade® skates and we'll go in-line skating.” (International Trademark Association, “Trademark Proper Use”)
	The fact is, verbing is one of the most common kinds of derivation in the English language, and it is not only trademarks which become verbs – any other term that can be easily associated with an action, such as “access,” “host,” “gift,” or “chair,” is often used as a verb, and seeing as trademarks usually pertain to new ideas and processes, it is no surprise that there is an impetus to make them easier to refer to.
3.5 Designation
	The rule that is probably least adhered to (due to the fact that it is very confusing) is the placement of proper symbols, ®, TM, or SM, at the ends of trademarks, or optionally placing the word “brand” between the trademark and the generic term. There are many misunderstandings which lead companies and other entities to not use these marks at all.
	One problem is that there is often confusion between all three marks. While ® is intended for use after trademarks which are registered with a governmental agency, (Trademark Association, “Trademark Proper Use”) many companies, such as Dell, forego the specification and choose to use the unregistered mark, TM, instead, despite the fact that their marked trademarks are registered.
	Another problem is distinguishing between a product, service, and company name. While Dell provides services, it still refers to itself with a trademark instead of a service mark. This might be due to the fact that SM is not widely seen or used. And while referring to it as a company, one should not place any marks after the name at all.
	Furthermore, though INTA even intends for consumers to use these marks, it is difficult to continuously place the marks in every place where they are required, especially due to constraints of keyboards and symbol insertion. 3Com offers instructions on incorporating trademarks into documents using different software and operating systems, but their selection is very limited. (3Com)
	Lastly, the word “brand” throws yet another wrench into INTA's rules about the grammatical specifications about trademarks. It is not said what part of speech “brand” is, see (8), but it would seem as if its insertion between the trademark and the generic term would mean that the trademark is now modifying the word “brand” instead.
Figure 8
4. Conclusion
	Despite the plethora of grammatical problems introduced by INTA's misguided rules, and despite companies' varied attempts at adhering to them, the most important factor in determining whether the rules are at all worthwhile lies with the consumer. Is it really the fault of companies misusing their own trademarks by calling their products “elevators” and “yo-yos”? Did the wild, uncontrolled spreading of their word really have an effect on their business, or was it the fact that they created something new in the first place that didn't have a name?
	It is understandable that INTA would provide companies with rules about trademark usage. Tis nothing wrong with emphasizing the product name, and it is worthwhile to provide credit where it is due when citing the products of other companies. But trademark genericide could be seen as a positive factor: companies can benefit from their trademark becoming the signature name of the product, where consumers are compelled to look for the one brand they have heard so much about.
	The argument for and against trademark protection can also be seen as a moral issue: should a certain company be able to hold onto a trademark forever, as long as it is properly maintained and contained? Is genericide an inevitable step in a trademark's life? Either way, one thing is clear: irules on grammar is futile in the long run. Grammar should not be warped and constrained to appease the whims of a corporation, when thousands of years of linguistic evolution go against them.

5. Works Cited
"Dell's Online Policies: Site Terms." Dell. 6 May 2007 <http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/policy/en/policy?~section=007>.
"Google Permissions." Google. 6 May 2007 <http://www.google.com/permissions/guidelines.html>.
"Hershey's Kisses." Wikipedia. 15 May 2007. 18 May 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hershey%27s_Kisses&diff=131061897>.
"HERSHEY's KISSES Brand Chocolates." Hershey's. 17 May 2007 <http://www.hersheys.com/kisses>.
"Image:Lego Website Brand Name Notice.Png." Wikipedia. 23 Apr. 2007. 19 May 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lego_website_brand_name_notice.png>.
"Mega Bloks Wins SCOC Ruling on Lego Trademark." CBC News17 Nov. 2005. 19 May 2007 <http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2005/11/17/megabloks-051117.html>.
"Microsoft Trademarks." Microsoft. 12 Apr. 2007. 6 May 2007 <http://www.microsoft.com/library/toolbar/3.0/trademarks/en-us.mspx>.
"Pepsi USA." Pepsi. 19 May 2007 <http://www.pepsi.com/>.
"Proper Adjective." Wikipedia. 25 Apr. 2007. 14 May 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_adjective>.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. "Trademark Grammar." Language Log. 22 May 2004. Dept. of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania. 6 May 2007 <http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000943.html>.
"Redirect Page - LEGOS." LEGO.Com. 19 May 2007 <http://www.legos.com>.
Templeton, Brad. "Origin of the Term "Spam" to Mean Net Abuse." Brad Templeton's Home Page. <http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html>.
"Trademark Proper Use." International Trademark Association. 18 Sept. 2006. 6 May 2007 <http://www.inta.org/images/stories/downloads/InfoPub/20060918%20tm%20proper%20use%20-%20rev.ppt>. 
"Trademarks and Brands." 3Com. 20 May 2007 <http://www.3com.com/corpinfo/en_US/legal/trademark/prop_usage_tmb.html>.
"Trademarks." United States Patent and Trademark Office. 16 Apr. 2007. 19 May 2007 <http://www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm>.
"Trademarks Vs. Generic Terms." International Trademark Association. 6 May 2007 <http://www.inta.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1514>.
"Windows Home Page." Microsoft. 14 May 2007 <http://www.microsoft.com/windows>.