Trademarks Lexis and Lexus (was nexis is baffling)

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Tue Apr 10 00:37:32 UTC 2007


>>I'd assume from
>>Compaq and Qantas going out of their way to include them that they
>>can't be universally held in disrepute.  And they do give you all
>>those extra points in Scrabble, after all.
>
>To be fair to Qantas, their name comes from Queensland And Northern
>Territory Aerial Services -- hence the lack of a u in the spelling.
>(They no longer render the name in all caps, so it's not QANTAS. I
>wish drug manufacturers would follow their lead -- gad, how I hate
>how often they insist on putting their brand name in ALL CAPS in
>their various literature. Oops, sorry for the digression.)

Another all-caps acronymic q-term is NASDAQ.

>
>I remember about a decade ago the cell phone to have (for a month or
>so) was a the Q-phone. But it's true that X and Z seem much more
>popular among the branding and marketing set. I wonder whether
>there's an aesthetic element as well -- straight lines and sharp
>angles versus an ovoid with a tail.
>
I'm not sure why that consideration would discourage the use of Q; if
you...um, conceptualize such an ovoid-cum-tail (as it were) as a
fertilized egg, those have been popular with humans (and others) for
quite some time.

LH

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