PIZZA PIZZA LTD. v. REGISTRAR OF TRADE MARKS

Federal Court, Trial Division, Rouleau J., September 23, 1982 ....

Held, per Rouleau J., the appeal is allowed.

The expression "pizza pizza" is not a linguistic construction that is a part of normally acceptable spoken or written English. Repetition of a word has become well-established, accepted and understood as indicating trade names or trade marks of commercial enterprises.

APPEAL from a refusal of the Registrar of Trade Marks to register the mark PIZZA PIZZA, allowed.

The above excerpt is from the Canadian Patent Reporter, 67 C.P.R. (2d), pages 202 - 204.

I find the expert testimony on which the decision in the PIZZA PIZZA case was apparently based somewhat shocking because the testimony can be shown to be quite wrong.

Here is what the expert witness for Pizza Pizza Ltd. (a professor of linguistics) testified, as quoted in the judgment cited above:

"PIZZA PIZZA" is a phrase consisting of a single word repeated once. In linguistics, repetition of a word or syllable is known as "reduplication" or "iteration." The second time the word appears it may be identical or it may differ slightly from the first occurrence. While one can find a fairly large number of instances of reduplication in English, only a very small number of instances involve exact repetition as in "PIZZA PIZZA." More generally in English there is modification on the second occurrence.

"PIZZA PIZZA" does not have any assignable meaning based on the limited rules of reduplication in English as described in the recognized published grammatical literature. Reference texts on English grammar do not list as grammatical any constructions like "PIZZA PIZZA."

I wish to show that at least the two statements I have emphasized above are wrong. The others are of very dubious academic merit.

1. The number of instances involving exact repetition as in "PIZZA PIZZA" is actually legion.

Exact repetition of syllables (reduplication) is in the nature of all human languages. This is true of all stages of language use from the cradle to the grave. Besides reduplication of grammatical elements as in Sanskrit and Latin verb forms, kinship terms such as "mother" and "father" that an infant first learns to utter are repetitions of syllables starting with bilabial consonants. Bilabials are the easiest sounds to make after vowels. Thus we have mama, papa, etc. in English and other languages. Other words originating in children's speech are boo-boo, pee-pee, etc. Choo-choo, dada, gah-gah, goo-goo, nana, ta-ta, etc. are examples of words formed of repeated syllables using consonants ranging from alveolar to velar. (See "Some Semantic Functions of Reduplication in Various Languages" by Harold Key, Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 88-102).

Besides repetition of syllables, repetition of words also seems common in languages from Japanese to Standard English.

Professor (emeritus) Frederic G. Cassidy of the University of Wisconsin is an internationally recognized linguist, dialectologist, and lexicographer. He is currently Chief Editor of the mammoth project called Dictionary of American Regional English or DARE (ongoing since 1965 with the involvement of hundreds of linguists, field-workers, and editors) under the auspices of the American Dialect Society. Volume II (D - H) was published by Harvard University Press last year.

Says Cassidy in his well-known book Jamaica Talk (London, 1961): "In Standard English one finds three kinds of iteratives: the simple ones like hush-hush ...; those with vowel gradation like ding-dong ...; and the rhyming ones like handy-dandy" (Ch. IV, p. 69). Most English grammars will attest to this fact of language.

The following are simple iteratives like hush-hush that readily come to mind, some of them being as old as the English language: Bang Bang; bye-bye; Dear, Dear; goody-goody; Hear, Hear; Mary, Mary; Mirror, mirror; pooh-pooh; so-so; Well, well; win-win. Any user of English should be able to come up with scores of such formations.

Many of them may be said to supply a vocative case which a modern analytical language such as English lacks but is common in classical languages such as Sanskrit. In such iteratives, the speaker is invoking the name of a person or object or calling out to a person or persons, as in paging people through a public-address system. "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," the name of a TV series of the early eighties (regardless of its theme) is a good example of the vocative kind of repetition.

Another use of iteratives is in chants such as "Gorby! Gorby!"

Such chants, as well as iteratives like Bang-Bang and Hear, Hear may be repeated indefinitely, but the lexeme, or meaningful linguistic unit that qualifies as a dictionary entry, is composed of the same word repeated once, as in "PIZZA PIZZA." The odd triple formation, as in Oyez, oyez, oyez! is usually a rhetorical, poetical, or similar use, as in "the tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells" (Edith Sitwell), "the hoop-hoop-hoop of the large-bodied, grey-bearded monkey" (R. H. Elliot), or Santa Claus's trademark greeting "Ho-ho-ho!"

Two standard works on reduplicated words and syllables are: Dictionary of Reduplicated Words in the English Language by Henry B. Wheatley (London, 1866) and Reduplicated Words in English by Nils Thun (Uppsala, 1963). The latter work lists thousands of iterative words from Old English turtur (= turtle dove) through Middle English cuccu (= cuckoo) to Modern English. The Modern English words with identical reduplication as in tick-tick run into the hundreds, from agar-agar, aye-aye, and bah-bah to wow-wow, yak-yak, and zoo-zoo (dialect word for "wood pigeon"). Most of the list is drawn from the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary (1884 - 1928), its 1933 Supplement, and Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1896 - 1905).

A computer check of the 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary shows over 10,000 iterative words, from Absalom, Absalom and Aye, aye to yo-yo and zero-zero. (My thanks to Darrell Raymond, computer scientist, University of Waterloo, for searching the OED for iterative words using a special filter).

2. Contrary to what the expert witness for Pizza Pizza Ltd. says, "PIZZA PIZZA" does have two assignable meanings.

The more obvious meaning of the iterative form "PIZZA PIZZA" is exactly as in "Extra, Extra!" and other cries, namely, "Pizza for sale!"

A second meaning that has recently come into use in North American English is the meaning resulting from the use of iteration as an intensifier for emphasis. The structure "PIZZA PIZZA" can mean "pizza par excellence" or "the real pizza." This meaning will come through if, instead of saying each "pizza" of "PIZZA PIZZA" in a rising-falling tone, the first "pizza" is stressed and the second one left unstressed, as in the following sentence:

"This is not your run-of-the-mill pizza, but pizza pizza, just delivered by Pizza Hut." In this sentence, "PIZZA PIZZA" is pronounced (PEET.suh.peet.suh), not (PEET.suh.PEET.suh) as in the previous utterance.

I was alerted to this meaning by Fred Cassidy himself during a recent phone conversation. I later discovered "Doubles and Modifiers in English," Nancy L. Dray's M.A. thesis, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1987, which deals exhaustively with this subject.

Asked whether he believes this new meaning is older than 1982, Prof. Cassidy (who is 85) wrote: 'Yes, I have been aware of the use of iteration for emphasis for more than 10 years, in such sentences (from memory) as: "Well, I'm working, but it's temporary, not a JOB job." "Will they be serving food?" "Well, not FOOD food, just snacks." "That wasn't a JOKE joke, just a groaner." The latter two were furnished by members of the DARE staff, who declare it has been in use from many years ago.'

Harold Key's article and Nancy Dray's thesis (both cited above) take the study of this iterative phenomenon well back into the 1960s.

Usages such as "PIZZA PIZZA" in the new meaning are thus generic to the English language as spoken in North America. Any word in the English dictionary from A to Z can be used in this way to emphasize the character or quality of the object in question. One might say, for example, "The South African anteater is not the aardvark aardvark" or "Equus quagga, not Equus zebra, is the zebra zebra."

Grammatically, in such repetitions, the first word functions as a modifier; the first "pizza" modifies the second. Together, the two words constitute a noun phrase.

In the following examples, "busy," "easy," and "real" function as adverbial intensifiers with the meaning "very": "'Zombie Bandit' busy, busy man" (heading to AP story from Chicago in Toronto Globe & Mail, 25 Feb. 1992, p. A13); "an easy easy apricot trifle" (Marg Fraser in the Toronto Sun, 26 Dec. 1990, p. 210); "He made a real real mistake, that's how he lost the gold medal" (heard on TV).

Although the above usage is of recent origin, it may be said to be based on a much older usage in which intensifiers such as "very," "much," and "far" are repeated for emphasis, as in "very very good," "much much ... more careful," "far, far ... more carefully," and "so so ... much better." (See A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik, London, 1985).

SUMMARY & CONCLUSION

It is therefore not correct to say that "PIZZA PIZZA" is a linguistic construction that is not part of normally acceptable spoken or written English or that it is a coined phrase capable of referring distinctively to the pizza made by one company. "PIZZA PIZZA" is not more distinctive or original than any catchy phrase (e.g. "a kinder gentler society") that is based on common English vocabulary and grammar.

As shown above, "PIZZA PIZZA" is a linguistic construction of a purely descriptive kind with two clearly distinguishable meanings that are in common use. The first meaning has been part of standard spoken and written English since the beginnings of the language and seems to be characteristic of all human languages. The second meaning is based on a relatively new North American usage, but older than 1982, as shown by the linguistic literature on the subject.

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© 2002, Thomas M. Paikeday