Can we all just spell things out?

Ours is the ultimate ownership society, where even ethereal ideas are fair game to be claimed, controlled, bought and sold.

So I guess it was inevitable we'd start fighting for the rights to clichés. Consider the "12th Man" lawsuit, filed by Texas A&M University against the Seattle Seahawks. That institution of aggressive lawyering is aggrieved that our football team copied its 83-year-old cliché — the now-widespread practice of dubbing fans of any 11-player sports team the "12th Man."

Now would be the moment when I, as your local columnist, am supposed to taunt the Texans for subjecting us to such trivial inanities, just as we're soaring into the Super Bowl.

And I would. If it wasn't so lame that we copied a near-century-old cliché in the first place.

And if it weren't for an equally dubious struggle going on right here in Seattle. Over the e-mail smiley.

Last week, two Northwest "inventors" filed for a U.S. patent for a method to create and send smiley faces such as :-), frowny faces such as :-(, and vomiting faces such as :-xxx on your cellular phone.

That follows a patent last summer from the dreaded Microsoft Borg, also seeking to control the creation of custom smiley and frowny symbols, right down to the pixel.

And there was an earlier patent granted to a Kirkland company called Wildseed, now owned by AOL, also related to the use of the jokey text symbols on cellphones.

It's all part of jockeying by the titans of technology over who will be able to go to court to get a piece of the action when you wink — ;-) — using your cellphone. Seriously.

"These companies don't know what's going to be valuable, what will be the next big thing, so they try to patent absolutely everything," said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that monitors civil rights in cyberspace.

The symbols are known as emotional icons, or "emoticons" (for you digital illiterates, tilt your head to the left and you'll figure them out.) As our capacity for digesting the written word collapses to the size of a cellphone screen, emoticons have become stenographic stand-ins for feelings.

You know, all that stuff we used to convey when we actually spoke to one another. Or when we knew how to write.

Which brings me back to the 12th Man controversy. It turns out there's a Seattle way to just say what we want, at the game and in our e-mail.

I checked with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Texas A&M has a national trademark for "12th Man," but not for "Twelfth Man" — probably because they couldn't spell it. (Ye Olde 12th Man is also available, but admittedly doesn't have the same ring.)

We constantly remind ourselves we're the most literate of cities. If we would simply write everything out, in full and generous prose, we could simultaneously smack down Texas A&M and the emoticon tyrants.

It's either that, or the 12th Man will be :'-( all the way to the courthouse.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.