KATU morning producer Jennifer Kubus asked a good question on Twitter:
Newsroom debate about using the word “Taser” when brand of stun gun is unclear. Ok in news scripts or not? @AP @Poynter @OfficialTASER
— Jennifer Kubus (@JenniferKubus) November 19, 2013
And Taser replied.
@JenniferKubus @AP @Poynter It’s A-OK when the brand is known. Stun gun if it’s a direct contact shock device only. TASER isn’t a verb.
— OfficialTASER (@OfficialTASER) November 19, 2013
Nobody asked me, but I went ahead and said that I thought it was too late to put a lid on that usage. In fact, I think you could argue that horse left the barn six years ago, after Andrew Meyer shouted “Don’t Tase me, bro” during a 2007 John Kerry event. (He later trademarked the term.) “Tase” is accepted as a verb in Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition — the dictionary AP recommends in its stylebook. No less an authority than copy-editing demigod John E. McIntyre endorsed its use.
But as Taser pointed out to me via its Twitter account, the AP Stylebook says different: “Use the generic form if the brand is uncertain. Don’t use verbs like tasered. Exception: When verb forms appear in direct quotations, use lowercase.”
An interesting side note to all this: Taser inventor Jack Cover named his weapon after a book called “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle.” Titles, in U.S. copyright law, cannot be copyrighted.
But trademarks can be lost if they’re not protected. Trademark protection lawsuits are, in fact, a sign of the system “working as intended,” Verge managing editor and former copyright attorney Nilay Patel once told me. It’s why Google still tries to keep its name from being used as a verb (a problem Bing would love to have). It’s why Apple insists that “iPhone” is an adjective.
As it happens, I know someone who once underwent a deployment of stun-gun technology, to use terminology I think would be approved by Taser’s trademark policy and use guidelines (“Always use a TASER trademark as an adjective, not a noun or verb”). Jim Spellman, then a producer with CNN, was, er, exposed to a Taser for a 2008 segment called “Producer gets Tased, bro.” That encounter “hurt like the dickens,” Spellman told Nicole Lapin.
Used this way, “dickens” does not represent the visitation of trademark violence on a famous author: It derives from old British slang referring to the devil. It’s a “mild oath or exclamation of annoyance, surprise, or frustration,” Webster’s New World says, the kind of thing you might utter when you find out you can’t write that someone got good and tased.
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