relipid

Victor Steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Wed Jan 18 21:48:22 UTC 2012


Of course, there may be a good reason for Johnson&Johnson to shorten the
name to the point of sounding like nonsense--they would want to avoid it
being "merely descriptive", which they would not be able to trademark.
And if they used an even moderately sensible phrase, their competitors
would object to the trademark filing (it's cheap, by comparison). But,
ultimately, what they mean by "relipid formula" is "moisturizer".

     VS-)

On 1/18/2012 4:20 PM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
> On 1/18/2012 4:01 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>> ...
>> Of course, "relipid formula" is already formally trademarked, although
>> there is still plenty of time to object--on trademark, not on linguistic
>> grounds.
>>
>> http://goo.gl/cN30A
> --
>
> "Relipidification" (for which the above might be an abbreviation) is
> used here and there. Presumably = "putting back the oil" or so (here,
> "moistening the skin" or so), from "lipidify" taken as "make oily" or so.
>
> -- Doug Wilson

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list