Trade mark law

The fifth entry is la forclusion par tolérance, and the first noun is the hardest sort of false friend, one with a shared family tree. Old French had the verb forclore, built on fors, outside, and clore, to shut: to shut somebody out of something. The Normans carried its past participle forclos into English law, where it became « to foreclose » and narrowed until it meant one thing above all, what a lender does to a mortgaged house once the borrower stops paying. French kept the wider idea and narrowed it somewhere else entirely. La forclusion has nothing to do with mortgages: it is what happens when a time limit runs out, so that a right can no longer be exercised at all. Le demandeur est forclos says the claimant is out of time and no court will hear him on the merits. This entry is the trade mark case of it, the loss of the right to object after years of watching in silence, and the word English puts there is neither of the two: it is « acquiescence ». Read forclusion as foreclosure and a missed deadline turns into a repossession.