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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,

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Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. The writer of today's episode,

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Speaker 1: John Paritano, rescued two cats from a local vet back

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Speaker 1: in and named one Pandora. He says he was reading

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Speaker 1: a lot of Greek mythology back then. A couple of

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Speaker 1: years later, Pandora brand jewelry became all the rage. What

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Speaker 1: if John had trademarked that name first, he and his

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Speaker 1: furry friend could have been swimming in cat treats. Yet,

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Speaker 1: even if he had thought of it, according to two

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Speaker 1: New York University law professors, it probably would have been

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Speaker 1: too late to cash in. It seems that many of

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Speaker 1: the words we use every day are already trademarked, which

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Speaker 1: means it's difficult for entrepreneurs to find good names for

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Speaker 1: new companies. Take Pandora, for instance. Search the U S

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Speaker 1: Patent and Trademark Office database and you'd find a number

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Speaker 1: of companies that already used Pandora in their name, avatars,

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Speaker 1: and logos. There's a Pandora hair collection, Pandora Radio, and yes,

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Speaker 1: Pandora's box. The two professors looked at the six point

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Speaker 1: seven million trademark applications filed at the U S. Patent

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Speaker 1: and Trademark Office between two thousand three and sixteen. They

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Speaker 1: then studied a database of the hundred thousand most frequently

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Speaker 1: used words in American English. It's called the Corpus of

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Speaker 1: Contemporary American English. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there

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Speaker 1: are a bit under two hundred thousand words currently in

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Speaker 1: use in the English language, but according to the website

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Speaker 1: test your rocab dot com, the median adult native English

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Speaker 1: speaker knows only about twenty to thirty five thousand of them.

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Speaker 1: But back to the study, The authors also reviewed a

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Speaker 1: U S Census list of the a hundred and fifty

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Speaker 1: one thousand, six hundred seventy two most frequently occurring surnames

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Speaker 1: in the United States. What they found will knock your

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Speaker 1: socks off, which by the way, is also trademarked. They

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Speaker 1: wrote in a teen issue of the Harvard Law Review,

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Speaker 1: the data to present compelling evidence of substantial word mark depletion,

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Speaker 1: particularly with respect to the sets of potential marks that

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Speaker 1: businesses prefer. Most standard English words, short neologisms that are

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Speaker 1: pronounceable by English speakers, and common American surnames. Neologism is

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Speaker 1: a term for newly coined words or expressions. As best

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Speaker 1: we can tell, neologism is still available to be trademarked,

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Speaker 1: though other common words do have pending registrations, including even

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Speaker 1: the word the yes. The currently has eleven active trademark resignations.

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Speaker 1: The result of so many trademarks is that new businesses

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Speaker 1: have to strain their noggins, and yes, variations of noggin

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Speaker 1: are already taken to come up with monikers that aren't

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Speaker 1: already claimed, or resort to what's called a parallel registration.

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Speaker 1: That's when two companies use the exact same name as

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Speaker 1: long as it won't confuse consumers, for example, Delta Faucets

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Speaker 1: versus Delta Airlines. The authors wrote, given these conditions, new

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Speaker 1: applicants are increasingly resorting to suboptimal marks. The data indicate

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Speaker 1: that applicants are applying less often for standard English words

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Speaker 1: and common surnames, and more often for complex marks as

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Speaker 1: measured by character syllable and word count, and all of

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Speaker 1: this could likely explain why we see more company names

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Speaker 1: like flicker, Tumbler, and Lift, all of which leave out

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Speaker 1: letters or incorporate other misspellings of common words. Today's episode

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Speaker 1: was written by John Paritano and produced by Tyler Clang.

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Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other wordy topics,

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Speaker 1: visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain Stuff is production of

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Speaker 1: iHeart Radio. Or more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit

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