cromulent

[Ronald Butters]

You can't keep rights to a website if you don't use it, isn't that right?

Also, I think, anyone could purchase rights to any variant that no one has yet squatted on, e.g., <www.kromulent.com>,  <www.cromulentt.com>,  <www.cromulente.com>, <www.cromulentish.com>,   <www.kromulent.com>, <www.kromulentski.com>,  <www.kromulentskaya.com>,  <www.kromulentskawye.com>, <www.cromulent.net>, <www.cromulent.org>, <www.my-cromulent.com>, etc.


Also, you can't own a word (as Steve knows), though you can register a trademark for or associated with (e.g., as a slogan) a real product or service if you can convince the USPTO that it is not going to be confusable with someone else's trademark; that it is not generic; that it is not disparaging, scandalous, or obscene; etc.

And of course you cannot claim copyright (or patent) to a single word.

As for whether or not the word CROMULENT "should" be in the OED (or American Heritage, NOAD, Merriam-Webster, etc.), I leave that to the lexicographers, keeping in mind that if all the "fun" words were placed in a desktop dictionary one's desk would probably collapse.

I agree that Urban Dictionary is an "indispensable" collection of public opinion (and stuntful posturing, some of which borders on mere truthiness). But it is not a real dictionary any more than Fox News is a scientific poll of the political opinion of a cross-seciton of public opinion.


On Nov 3, 2010, at 2:52 PM, Steve Kl. wrote:

> I just wanted to point out I own www.cromulent.com   :D
> 
> Currently nothing's there -- it was my late husband's vanity site -- but I
> will eventually do something with it.
> 
> - Steve
> 
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Paul Frank <paulfrank at post.harvard.edu>wrote:
> 
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Paul Frank <paulfrank at POST.HARVARD.EDU>
>> Subject:      cromulent
>> 
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> So what does a word have to do to get into the OED? Take cromulent,
>> which Jonathan Lighter once used in this forum: it gets 55,900
>> googlits (that's more than twice as many as the word googlit itself,
>> which isn't in the OED either). The locus classicus of cromulent is
>> The Simpsons in 1996. My guess is that there are hundreds of thousands
>> of perfectly good English terms in, say, Termium
>> (www.termiumplus.gc.ca) and IATE (iate.europa.eu) which are not listed
>> in the OED, mainly because they're too boring or too technical to
>> interest OED lexicographers. But cromulent is a fun word that has
>> gained a life of its own. And the indispensable Urban Dictionary
>> acknowledges this.
>> 
>> Paul
>> 
>> Paul Frank
>> Translator
>> Chinese, German, French, Italian > English
>> Espace de l'Europe 16
>> Neuchâtel, Switzerland
>> paulfrank at bfs.admin.ch
>> paulfrank at post.harvard.edu
>> 
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