The Best of Science Fiction 12

Cord flushed red. "Con, for goodness' sake. It isn't at all remarkable!"

"Yes, my boy, it is ... to you." He leered at his lieutenant. "A man's name is his most enchanting possession. For you, for me, for Harvey Jayne, for anybody."

"So?"

"That's how we find a substitute for Neol. We will derive us a new word, from 'Jayne'. Harvey will find it irresistible. And it will be a good trademark. Think of the trouble American Cyanamid had, trying to find a trademark for their acrylic fiber. They finally named it after the project leader, Arthur Cresswell. They called it 'Creslan'. And Cluett-Peabody, naming their 'Sanforise' process for pre-shrunk fabric after the inventor, Sanford. And think of how many of Willard Dow's products are 'Dow' something or other, 'Dowicide', for example. And look at Monsanto's 'Santowax', 'Santowhite', 'Santomerse'. And Du Pont's 'Duponol', and W. R. Grace's 'Grex' polyethylene. So we'll name our terpineol after Harvey Jayne. 'Jayne-ol'. Of course not exactly 'Jayne-ol'. We'll have to fix it so he won't recognise it. Some phonetic equivalent."

"He'll recognise it, Con. It'll just make him madder."

"No, I don't think he will. A man has a selfish complex on his own name. He loves it, and he doesn't want other people to have it. He has trouble remembering people who have similar names. So if we do this right, he won't recognise it when he hears it. It'll fascinate him, but he won't understand why. He'll approve it on the spot. But first, we'll have to work him over, soften him up a little. So listen carefully as to what you have to do."

"Harvey," said Patrick, "you're making us revise our company leaflet on trademarks."

"I didn't know you had one," said Harvey Jayne suspiciously.

"It lists everything that shouldn't be done — all possible errors. At least it did . Now, you've added a few more. We'll have to revise."

"This brochure. You wouldn't happen to have a copy — "

Patrick handed him the leaflet. "Brand-new edition, just off the press this afternoon."

Jayne read slowly. " 'The trademark should be capitalised, and preferably set in distinctive type. If the trademark is registered in the United States Patent Office, follow it with the registration symbol, ®. If no application for registration has been filed, or, if filed, not yet granted, then use an asterisk after the trademark, with footnote identification. Hope Chemical Company's trademark for ... '." He looked up. "I'm not sure I follow your reasoning on this particular point. For example, I didn't capitalise 'neol'. I don't care whether it's capitalised or not. And I didn't say 'trademark' every time I said 'neol'. I just said plain old neol. I want it to become so familiar to our customers that they'll think of it as a household word."

Patrick shook his head sadly. "Harvey, I understand your viewpoint, and I deeply sympathise. Such charity and philanthropy are all too infrequent in this hatchet-hearted corporation."

"Charity? Philanthropy?"

"Yes. Really touching. Gets me, here." Patrick struck his fist to his chest. "You want to give the trademark to the general public, including our competitors. Come one, come all, anybody can use this name, which isn't a trademark any more, because Harvey doesn't want it spelled with a capital."

"I don't see how spelling it lowercase prevents it from being a trademark."

"It converts it into the thing itself . Remember 'cellophane'? It used to be Du Pont's trademark for transparent wrappings, and it was spelled with a capital 'C'. And then it became so well known that the newspapers and magazines began spelling it lower case, and they never mentioned it was Du Pont's brand of anything, because everybody by that time thought of cellophane only as the transparent wrapping itself. It had become the common name of the thing itself: it had become generic . Now anybody can sell his own transparent wrapping and call it 'cellophane'. Cellophane has now joined the list of irresistible trademarks that are wide open to the public: shredded wheat, mineral oil, linoleum, escalator, aspirin, milk-of-magnesia."

"Anything else wrong?"

"Several other points. On the title page, you ought to say 'Copyright, Hope Chemical Company'."

"But how can I say 'Copyright' before we publish? I thought you just said you couldn't do that. You said we couldn't say Neol was registered."

"I won't try to explain it, Harvey. That's the way it has worked out historically."

"Anything else?"

"We don't like your trademark, 'Neol'," said Patrick. "We think it infringes at least one mark already registered. Besides which, it's a weak mark, made up of weak syllables."

"What ... what are you saying?" sputtered Jayne. "There's nothing wrong with 'Neol'. How can it be weak?"

"Look at it this way," said Patrick smoothly. "Fashions in trademarks come and go, like women's hats. At the moment, the ad people are conditioned to think in terms of certain well-worn prefixes and suffixes. The suffix is supposed to classify the product as a liquid, a solid, a plastic, a synthetic fiber, a flooring compound, soap, deodourant, toothpaste, and so on. True, they have their differences, but these are minuscule. The pack of them are so much alike you'd take them for a children's a capella choir."

"That's probably true for most trademarks," said Harvey Jayne smugly, "but not for 'Neol'. 'Neol' was selected by our computer, which was programmed to synthesise words from certain mellifluous-sounding syllables, and to discard everything harsh. And not only that, but to present a final list of one hundred names graded according to final audial acceptance. 'Neol' headed the list."

Patrick shook his head pityingly. "Look, Harvey, when you use a computer, you've got two-and-a-half strikes against you from the start. In the first place, the only marks the computer can grind out will be made up of these forbidden syllables we've already ruled out. And secondly, no computer can zero in on the gray area between the legally acceptable 'suggestive' marks and the legally unacceptable 'descriptive' marks. Even the courts have a hard time with this concept. To demonstrate this, we are going to decomputerise 'Neol' for you."

"De ... computerise ... ?"

"Yes, our decomputer takes a computerised trademark and tells us whether it's too close to known marks or names to be registrable."

"May I see it, this decomputer?"

"You could, but that won't be necessary. It's so simple, I'll just describe it to you briefly. It consists of two cylinders, rotating on the same shaft, one next to the other. On the left cylinder we have prefixes; on the right, suffixes. All our syllables were compiled from trademarks in the chemical and plastics fields. When a new trademark comes in, we break it down into syllables and see if it's in our decomputer. If it's not here, we search it in the Trademark Division of the Patent Office, in Washington."

"What syllables do you have on your, ah, decomputer?" said Jayne uneasily.

"Really only the extremely common ones. For prefixes, things like 'ray', 'hy', 'no', 'ko', 'kor', 'di', 'so', 'ro', the 'par-per-pro' set, 'vel', 'val', and of course, 'neo'."

"Neo, you said?"

"Yes, 'neo', which is simply the Greek variant of 'new', which again frequently comes out as 'nu', or in the Latin form, 'novo'."

"And I presume 'ol' is among your proscribed suffixes?" demanded Jayne bitterly.

"Yes, that's 'ol', from Latin, 'oleum', oil. So that gives us 'Neol', or 'new oil'."

Jayne frowned and looked at his notes. "Well, how about 'Neolan'? Or do you have 'lan' in your suffixes, too?"

"Yes, indeed. But there again, we consider 'lan' as a species of the 'on' family, from 'rayon', of course. Between vowels, 'on' takes a consonant, so you would come out with 'lin', 'lan', 'lon', and so you have 'neolan'."