RuthAnnHarnisch.com

This Thrillionaire Is Not One Of Those Thrillionaires

by Ruth Ann Harnisch on 10/26/09 at 10:08 pm

My husband still likes to talk about the day Oprah Winfrey said hello to me.

Barbara Mandrell, a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, was on Oprah’s television show to talk about her autobiography.  In the book, Barbara quotes an OpEd piece I wrote for the Nashville Banner.  Before Oprah became, you know, Oprah, she was just another member of the Channel 5 Eyewitness News Team at the CBS affiliate in Nashville.  So it was only natural for Oprah to look into the camera, wave, and say, “Hi, Ruthie” to her former colleague.

As you might imagine, the phone started ringing. You can imagine. “Oprah said hello to you!”

Well, for a minute today, I thought Oprah must have given me another shout-out, because my phone and email have been crazy. “Did you see this?” “Is this you?”

No, it wasn’t Oprah. It was an announcement from a group of entrepreneurs called The Thrillionaires. And no, I’m not a part of that group. Nobody from the group has ever contacted me.

Practically everyone in my circle knows I’ve been using the word “Thrillionaire”  to describe myself for years. I have a website at http://thrillionaires.org, and I liked the word so much I even  trademarked it. I paid a professional graphic design firm to create a Thrillionaires logo, stationery, business cards, little coin boxes, all to promote the notion that anyone who knows what it feels like to experience the thrill of giving is a “Thrillionaire.”

I talked about “my” word with Anu Garg of A Word A Day fame, and asked how to get into dictionaries. “People have to use it,” he said.

And that’s where The New York Times came in.  Back in the days when rich people felt rich and happily played for the chance to be the most conspicuous consumers, some very wealthy people were willing to spend millions on rare experiences that produce major adrenaline. You know, the guy who’ll spend $20 million to buy a ticket to the Space Station, that sort of thing. The Times dubbed them “Thrillionaires,” people who spent millions for thrills.

Well, that’s not “my” Thrillionaire. By my definition, you get your thrill from doing something for someone else, whether it’s giving a kidney or a kind word, a few pennies or a few hours of your volunteer time. Anyone, not just the rich, can experience the thrill of giving.  Anyone can be a Thrillionaire. I’d been saying so, publicly, for quite some time before those thrill-buying millionaires stepped right up and became the more widely-known definition of Thrillionaire overnight.

I thought about this, and wrote a thoughtful letter to The New York Times’ legal department, citing my trademark, my activities using the word, and so forth, and asking politely that this receive some acknowledgment from The Times, as a simple Google search would have turned up my coinage of Thrillionaire…it was the only one out there at the time.

The Times wrote back a very few words, the essence of which could be summed up as “Tough.”

I thought about the expensive attorneys and the legal work that had already cost many thousands of dollars to secure my rights to that word I thought was “mine.”

And then I remembered, sadly, that if you want to defend these things that you can spend all your time and all your money doing just that, and you might not win, and you might win the case but lose in the battle of public opinion, or lose your business, or lose all your resources that would enable you to do something else.

That’s why I ignored when a book came out using “Thrillionaires,” knowing this was not a fight I wanted to pay for, because language is a living thing and one cannot truly “own” a word, can one?

So I just let it go, and recognized that I couldn’t control it. It’s an arrangement of letters, and people can and will use the word, and even though I think I made it up and put it out there, I can’t stop others from defining it in their way, and even trying to make money using it.

While I’ve been writing this I received two more “Do you know about this?” emails from associates.  Yes, I know about this.

Do you know about THIS?  http://thrillionaires.org