Olympic copywrited words

[jefmcg]

Ahem - copyrighted, not copywrited. Soz.

Yeah, but doh. Oh, its in the title! There is a good reason no one pays me to be an editor

 

[Markymark]

I did notice during the Sydney Olympics a lot of ambush advertising. Companies who had spent no money sponsoring, using weasel words to give the impression they did.

I hate almost everything about the Olympics, including knowing for a fact that my tax dollars ($A) were used to pay for prostitutes Olympic delegates, but this one, I'm okay with.

I naively thought the Olympics were sponsored by Coca Cola, Nike and Bert's Cafe on the A12.

 

[Shut Up Legs]

If they must copyright various Olympics-related words, can't they just copyright the equivalent Greek words? Preferably in the ancient dialects?

 

[MichaelW2]

If Carlsberg did ambush marketing....

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

For the next few weeks we had better get used to living without several words of the English language which are now held to be the creative property of the International Olympic Committee. These include:
2016/ Rio / Rio de Janeiro
Gold/Silver/Bronze/Medal
Effort/Performance/Challenge
Summer/Games
Sponsor/Victory/Drug Cheat
Olympian/Olympics/Olympus Games/Olympiad/
Citius /Altius/Fortius/Maximus/Decimus/Meridius

Get used to not using them in casual conversation.

OWWWWW You just said them, I'm telling Mr Coe on you!!

 

[jefmcg]

I naively thought the Olympics were sponsored by Coca Cola, Nike and Bert's Cafe on the A12.

I assume that Bert's Cafe is meant to be the odd one out of that list, but actually it's Coke. Nike doesn't sponsor the olympics, but spends a great deal of effort ambushing, which is why most people probably think they do. Apparently they built a village next to the olympic village in Atlanta, and handed out flags to ticket holders, so they were more visible than the official sponsor.

The one I remember was Qantas ambushing the Sydney olympics, putting out full page ads while not actually sponsoring it. This is probably what lead to the current rules. If you had asked me which airline sponsored the Sydney Olympics, I would have confidently said "Qantas" (it was the now-defunct Ansett, and one of the reasons it is now defunct).

If it was just Bert's et al, they wouldn't bother with laws.

 

[Salad Dodger]

We wont be ale to use the word "Dopers"?

 

[Salad Dodger]

To be honest it annoys me more when Medal is used as a verb

Now "podium" is also being used as a verb......

 

[jefmcg]

To be honest it annoys me more when Medal is used as a verb

especially when they spell it wrong. "I would have got away it, if it wasn't for those darn medalling kids!"

 

[srw]

To be honest it annoys me more when Medal is used as a verb

It's been around for over 150 years, as a quick look at the OED shows.

1860 Thackeray in Cornhill Mag. Feb. 130 Irving went home medalled by the king.
1890 Granta 6 Dec. 114/1 In that year it was decided that both crews should be medalled, the winners with silver, the losers with bronze.
1865 T. Lyman Let. 13 Mar. in G. R. Agassiz Meade's Headquarters (1922) 320 The medal was of gold, three pounds in weight... ‘I believe, sir, you are the first man who medalled with his battalion.’

Now "podium" is also being used as a verb......

That one's more recent (1992 - still 24 years ago), but the art of verbing nouns is one that's been around in English for a very long time.

 

[Salad Dodger]

Using words like "verbing"........

 

[srw]

Using words like "verbing"........

1928 Canton (Texas) Herald 27 Jan. 6/3 The tendency to yank words out of one classification as a part of speech and make them do the work of other parts of speech—verbing a lot of nouns, for example.
1936 F. Clune Roaming round Darling vii. 62 The Poet accused me of verbing a noun, but I soon fixed him. I threatened to noun a verb.
1978 Verbatim Sept. 7/1 Take..the four names of the four seasons. Two have been verbed, and two have not. One summers, in Maine, and winters, perhaps, in Florida.
1984 Philos. of Sci. 51 465 Practically any noun can be verbed in English.

That pesky OED again.

It's one of the joys of English - it's a very flexible language. One of the other joys is its odd spellings, which you can trace back to English words' mongrel origins as a mixture of Germanic, Latin via French and other foreign influences.

 

[srw]

Just to rub the point home, here's a page listing a lot of examples of Shakespeare verbing nouns, as well as adjectiving verbs and nouning adverbs.

http://www.shakespeareswords.com/Functional-shift

All of which is a long way from the regrettable tendency of the IOC to try and control language in unreasonable ways.

 

[MiK1138]

To be honest it annoys me more when Medal is used as a verb

Oh so you have a problem with Scooby Doo, that was full of Medalling Kids

 

[jefmcg]

Oh so you have a problem with Scooby Doo, that was full of Medalling Kids

that's one TMN to me.