Introduction to Mc: Meaning in the Marketplace

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Introduction to Mc- Meaning in the Marketplace

• November 7,2006

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What do you call these things?
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(No Transcript)
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In the US (Wisconsin)

• Q-tips kleenex

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• scotch tape

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In England

• a hoover (used to hoover the floor)

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In the Southern U.S.

• a coke
• (even if the flavor is orange or grape!)

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• Each of these examples shows how a brand name
  for a product can come to be used as a generic
  noun. This is very common kind of semantic
  change.

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• In some cases, the semantic change can go so far
  that a noun can even start to be used as a verb
  Hoover (brand name) ? hoover (generic word for
  vacuum cleaner) ? to hoover (verb, meaning "to
  vacuum the floor")

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• This kind of change is a natural linguistics
  process, but companies often fight against this
  tendency.
• They want to protect their brand names and the
  images associated with them, and so they
  trademark their product names to legally protect
  them.

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• Average Americans may use the word "kleenex" for
  any brand of tissue, but the name "Kleenex" is a
  trademark owned by the Kimberley-Clark
  Corporation.

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• Other tissue manufacturers can't use the word to
  sell their products. If they do so, it is
  trademark infringement (a violation of the
  trademark law.)

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• Even when a brand name has become used as a
  common noun, companies often fight to keep their
  trademarks because it can give them an advantage
  in the marketplace.
• If someone asks you to "buy some kleenex", for
  example, you are probably more likely to buy the
  kleenex with the name Kleenex.

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• However, in some cases, generic usage has become
  so widespread that companies decided to give up
  their right to the trademark, and the word then
  becomes a generic noun in the legal sense too.
• This has happened with words such as aspirin and
  escalator.

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• Can you think of more examples (in any language)
  of brand names that have become, or are in the
  process of becoming, generic labels?

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• The protection of trademarks is well established
  in American law.
• The reading for next week, however, describes an
  unusual legal case in which a corporation claimed
  that their trademark protection extended to part
  of a word, a single morpheme, namely, Mc-.

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• Notice that Mc- is not even a whole word, or
  entire brand name. Its just one morpheme (one
  part) of the name McDonalds.

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• Mc- is a Scottish morpheme meaning son of, and
  McDonald is a surname meaning son of Donald.
• This surname became used as a corporation name,
  but of course, there are still many people who
  use it as a surname.

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The legal case

• Quality Inns International planned to use the
  name McSleep Inns for a new chain of budget
  hotels.
• McDonald's Corporation sued them, saying that it
  infringed on their trademark.

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• Quality Inns said that they chose the name
  McSleep because they believed that Mc- gave the
  the name "an image of thift and cleanliness.
• They argued that this image came not from the
  McDonald's corporation, but from the association
  of Mc- with Scottish things.

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• They said that many Scottish surnames start with
  Mc-, and there is a (positive) stereotype of
  Scottish people as being thrifty and clean.
• They also argued that while McDonald's owned the
  trademark for the word McDonald's, it did not own
  the morpheme Mc-.

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• McDonald's argued that people would associate
  product names including Mc- with their
  corporation's products.
• They had won an earlier lawsuit against a
  restaurant which was using the name McBagel's.

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• The judge in that case had said that when Mc- was
  used with a generic food name (bagels), it was an
  infringement of the trademark.
• Probably this decision was made considering such
  as McDonald's products such as McFries, McChicken
  Sandwich, and McShakes.

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• McDonald's argued that this previous judgment
  showed that, although it didn't own Mc- itself,
  it owned a "family" of trademarks made using Mc-
  noun.

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• Quality Inns then argued that they were not using
  the name in a food related industry sleep is not
  a noun referring to food.

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This case is interesting for us for two reasons.

• It shows how linguistic issues might be involved
  in a legal case
• It shows us one way linguists can gather evidence
  to learn about how language is actually used.

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Other linguistic issues

• In addition to the question of whether or not
  McDonald's can be said to own a family of
  trademarks, there are a few other issues
  important to the case.

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• 1. Would people think that McSleep Inns were
  related to the McDonald's Corporation?
• If not, then there is a legal precedence for
  allowing two companies to use the same brand
  name.

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• For example, Notre Dame University and Notre
  Dame Cheese were both allowed to use Notre Dame,
  because it was judged that the public would not
  confuse the two or think that they were related.

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• 2. Can we say that Mc- is a generic morpheme, in
  the same way that aspirin is a generic noun (and
  in the way that Kleenex is becoming one too)?

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• The authors were asked to provide evidence to
  answer that last question, by showing how the
  prefix Mc- was actually being used to create new
  words.

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• They hoped to show that Mc- had a meaning of its
  own, independent of the one created by the
  McDonald's corporation.
• That evidence could establish Mc- as a kind of
  generic morpheme which would then not be covered
  by trademark laws.

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• The method used by Lentine and Shuy is a kind of
  corpus linguistics.
• Using a computer program, they searched a large
  collection of newspapers and magazines, looking
  for words containing Mc-.

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• They assembled these articles into a database,
  and then analyzed the way the Mc- words were
  used.
• The goal was to find out how writers understood
  and used Mc-.

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• To find out about their results, read the
  homework assignment!

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Note

• The article includes 5 pages of examples at the
  back. You will probably want to sure to look at
  them at least briefly, but you don't have to read
  each of the examples carefully.
• To help you read, on the class web page, you can
  find a list of definitions of linguistic terms
  used in this article.

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After doing the reading, please prepare for class
by thinking about the following questions

• Content Questions 4 and 7 on page 82
• Questions for Discussion and Analysis 1 and 3,
  also on page 82
• And also

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• Do you think the judge made the right decision in
  this case? Why or why not?

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QUIZZES RETURNED

• To help you study for the mid-term exam, you can
  pick up your past quizzes as you leave the room
  today. They are stapled together, and if you
  took all the quizzes, there should be FOUR of
  them.
• Be sure that you know the correct answers for the
  questions you got wrong!