obscene

Dan’s Mom will be very proud. Or mortified. He won a big trademark victory today, to make the world safe for nut sacks everywhere.

The US trademark office preliminarily determined that NUT SACK was “immoral” and “scandalous,” as a brand name for beer. Dan went to the mat to protect Engine 15 Brewing Co. and their NUT SACK. The opinion is here (and, ironically, it is much more NSFW than the label itself). In its nether regions it says:

Given the mental images the term “Nut Sack” will likely raise, the weight of the dictionary entries suggests that using this indelicate term may well raise eyebrows at a formal dinner party. On the other hand, in seeking to apply the extremely broad “vulgarity” standard to a slang term, we think it wise to bear foremost in our minds the governing language of the statute (“immoral,” “scandalous”) … . We observe that many slang terms come into the lexicon because the formally correct, clinical word for the thing itself is deemed uncomfortably potent. This seems to be particularly true with respect to parts of the human body, in which case speakers adopt the slang terms precisely because they seem less intense, less indelicate, than the formally correct or technical terminology. Cases of alleged scandalous matter...