The Smoking Gun has the scoop on a comedian whose trademark application for "You cum like a little girl" was turned down by the USPTO as too smutty — and the patent examiner who send 10MB of pornographic images to her to prove that "cum" was too dirty to be a trademark. Shades of Lenny Bruce: To is a Preposition, Cum is a Verb!
In a July notice to applicant Cathy Carlson, United States Patent and Trademark Office examining attorney Patrick Shanahan reported that since the word "cum" was "directly associated with degrading sexual acts," her trademark request was "deemed scandalous" and therefore not eligible for registration… In the rejection notice, Shanahan wrote that, "as distasteful as it may seem, the trademark examining attorney refers to a sampling of excerpted materials from the Google search engine in which CUM appeared in reference to ejaculation in hundreds of stories. See attachments." Those attachments contain the smut, which attorney Shanahan apparently found on two pornographic web sites. As Carlson told the Weekly, "He could have sent one picture. He sent 10 megabytes." (21 pages)
(Thanks, Beryllium!)
