Disputes over Spelling and Punctuation

Chapter 7 discusses lawsuits in which spelling and punctuation were at the basis of the dispute. One involved the Salesforce Company, which uses the trademark SALESFORCE written as a single word, as opposed to the two-word SALES FORCE, which is generally used as a descriptive compound for a group of salespeople responsible for selling the goods or services of a company, i.e. any company. It is shown, on the basis of various corpora sensitive to spellings and word separations, that SALESFORCE has indeed achieved unique reference and source identification. The chapter then discusses MOVIEGUIDE, which was similarly claimed to be a trademark, but on this occasion semantic and corpus evidence showed that the two-word MOVIE GUIDE and the one-word MOVIEGUIDE were used interchangeably, both as generic terms. Finally, a lawsuit is discussed in which the dispute centered around who exactly was covered by insurance in the phrase THE NAMED INSURED: X, Y as a result of the comma between X and Y.