TM

What’s in a name? Well, quite a bit of money and amour-propre, if a recent report is to be believed.

Actually I don’t know that there is any recent report, but there probably is and the chances are that some journalist has seen it and is cobbling together a space-filling article which will claim some authenticity by linking itself to the report. You know the sort of thing - “Scientists/Academics (or – if it’s a local paper “boffins”) from Nether Herdovit University have shown for the first time that what you and your mates thought was bleeding obvious was, in fact, first observed by Professor Baggins and his university research team in the course of a three-year EPSRC study. And, by the way, can they please have some more money to carry out lots more career-creating research, the results of which only they and the other 57™ academics worldwide who have any interest in the topic will read?”. But I digress. (Bit of a shock, eh?)

Actually, before I finish this digression (I will, I will), there’s something that puzzled me in my brief flirtation with the life of academe. It’s that the funders, who actually pay for the research - Research Councils and private sector organisations alike - seem to have practically no interest in the results of the research, once it has been published. They just go ahead and fund something completely different. Unlike the academics who keep quarrying the same seam, rewriting the same articles, tweaking them here and there, quoting each other in academic journals, until it is time for them to retire and forget the whole subject. Like everyone else did, years before.

Now, where was I? Ah, yes, the ownership of names. Do you remember that case, long ago, when Harrod’s™ department store, in London’s fashionable Knightsbridge (who was the knight in Knight’s Bridge, I wonder?) sued, I think it was Roy Harrod, the owner of a hardware(?) shop in a dorp in New Zealand. They alleged that people might dismount from their sheep, walk into Roy Harrod’s shop and, seeing the sheep-shearing equipment hanging from the nails on the beams alongside the galvanised buckets say,”’pon my soul, old thing, that Egyptian chappie’s letting this place down a spot, don’t y’ know?”

That’s the same sort of confusion that the manufacturers of American Budweiser™ beer tried to prevent when they attempted to stop the Czech brewers in Budweis calling their beer Budweiser™™, from which the US product had taken its name, in case drinkers bought the original beer by mistake, thinking it was the same thing. The same thing! One of them tastes like carbonated Lysol™ and the other tastes like the Nectar of Elysium™! I couldn’t possibly say which is which, for fear of being sued. (You can see that they had made their case though, as my Spellchecker™, thought “Budweiser™” was OK, but questioned “Budweis”.)

Of course, that was in the days before Transcendental Meditation was called TM™.