EVERYTHING is trademarkable, and does get trademarked after they come into common use. “Let’s roll.” “Nothing but net.” “Stealth.” Everything.
Like patents on common ideas, it’s a matter of whether someone is willing to spend a fortune fighting you when you sue them. The trick is to sue those with little resources, at least until you’ve built up a war chest and a few wins.
that used to be a mod tactic here before BB switched to Wordpress. comments didn’t get removed, just disemvoweled. I don’t know if this was before or after Bezos bought the WP.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden used the vowel-deletion technique in 2002 for internet forum moderation on her blog Making Light.[5] This was termed disemvoweling by Arthur D. Hlavaty later in the same thread.[6]
Nielsen Hayden joined the group blog Boing Boing as community manager in August 2007[citation needed] , when it re-enabled comments on its posts,[7] and implemented disemvoweling.
Antinous was still using it when I started as a moderator (2011-ish?), but it was phased out soon after that. I think that’s because we started using Disqus, which allowed people to edit their comments. It didn’t work as well if people could just add the vowels back.