Unusually, I’m lost for words.  Not words in general, as you can see, but specific words to describe the phenomenon of self-collision between parent and divisional applications identified in European practice by Malcolm Lawrence and Marc Wilkinson of Avidity IP as the poisonous…  I’d better stop there.  In the light of UK Trade Mark Registration No. 2612561, I think we need to find a new generic term.  “Putrid Priority” is often the real problem but as a term, this doesn’t sound like an improvement.  It would be good to make some reference to the overarching phenomenon of self-collision.  How about “divisional collision”?  Why not – let’s see by the end of the article whether it trips off the tongue well enough as we consider its application in in Nestec S.A. et al v. Dualit Limited et al.

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