A post from student blogger Nicole

Doesn’t the title look like a made up work?  Well believe it or not it’s actually real!  It’s pronounced [flok-suh-naw-suh-nahy-hil-uh-pil-uh-fi-key-shuh n] and it’s one of the longest words in the English language.  It means the estimation of something as valueless.  Well I sure can think of something that’s valueless and it’s this word.  Who would ever use this word in a sentence or write it down.  It’s definitely not worth the 3 minutes it even takes to say it, if you didn’t have the pronunciation already at hand, or the amount of spelling errors just to write it.

But enough about this unnecessarily long word.  I just figured it would be a perfect transition into talking about patent law and made up words (in a good way).  Surprisingly there are many made up words when it comes to writing patent applications.  When it comes to describing something, sometimes all of the real words in the dictionary just don’t cut it.  Because of this, the made up words were born.  Here are a few examples that I could come up with off the top of my head.  Therebetween, slidably, hingedly, releasably, removably.  They’re real words but not used correctly as real words.  Regular adverbs just don’t cut it.  Obviously describing a wall locking mechanism that can lock two walls together but also release the lock of the walls, doesn’t work.  So instead it becomes a wall locking mechanism for releasbly locking the walls.  Also describing a member that can slide against a mechanism could be described as the member is slidably movable against a mechanism.  This helps get to the point easier and describe the object in a shorter way that still makes sense.  There are very few times, while reading patent applications that I can remember where the made up words didn’t work.  I have to admit though, I am not a fan of therebetween.  That was why it was one of the few words I could think of.  To me it just sounds awkward and bulky.  But it works for enough people for me to have come across it.  So if you’re good at making up adverbs, or are okay with using them, then patent application drafting is for you!