If Michigan football fans are looking for more reasons to be annoyed by their rivals to the south, they're in luck.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office officially approved Ohio State's request to trademark the word 'THE' on Tuesday, allowing the university to control the use of the grammatical article on clothing, namely “t-shirts, baseball caps and hats."
As highlighted in a Twitter thread by trademark attorney Josh Gerben, OSU first applied for the trademark in August 2019. At first, the USPTO refused the trademark, deeming it ornamental and because an existing application by clothing company Marc Jacobs had been filed months earlier for the word.