Denise Whiting

The idea — the very idea! — that one woman could legally own a word so deeply entrenched in Baltimore's lexicon, a term that seems to touch on the city's very blue-collar, audacious essence, did not sit well with many Baltimoreans. On Sunday, capping a week of outrage about Cafe Hon owner Denise Whiting's trademarking the word "Hon," about 50 people gathered in Hampden to protest. The demonstration was organized through social media, particularly a Facebook page called "Boycott Cafe Hon . " It was one of several sites that sprang up last week after Baltimoreans found out that Whiting had established legal rights to the word "Hon.

Denise Whiting has not only built her life around the fabled Balmer Hon, opening Cafe Hon and founding the city's annual Honfest — she's helped to make the three-letter term of endearment a household word around town. Now she owns it. Whiting has officially trademarked the word "Hon. " Over the years, she has trademarked almost every play on the word she could think of. Like the words " Cafe Hon " and "Honfest" and "Hon Bar" and "Hontown," the name of her newest Hampden shop.

One of the best Christmas cards out there can be found at NotCafeHon, the Twitter feed created after cafe owner Denise Whiting trademarked the word "hon. " There's a photo of Whiting celebrating with the mayor who came to her rescue a little over a year ago when the restaurant's pink flamingo was imperiled. "Merry Christmas," the card reads, "from a disgraced woman who stole from Baltimore … and Sheila Dixon . " On the same topic, a Baltimorean posted on Facebook: "Just realized that the Boycott Cafe Hon Facebook Page is registered under the username ' Cafe Hon .' What a huge mistake on Cafe Hon 's part for not getting to it first.

Anyone who ever had an inclination to do so should get all their family members sweatshirts or T-shirts invoking "Hon" in some way: "Merry Christmas, Hon," "Happy New Year, Hon," "Welcome to Bawlmer, Hon," and, to drive home the point, "You Don't Own Me, Hon" (off the 1964, Hon-era Lesley Gore song). That's my suggestion for a unified public response to Denise Whiting's crass effort to own a Baltimore regionalism — take away the local market for her wearable Hon merchandise by springing for some custom-made sweats and T's for our next of kin. Let her try and put a stop to that.

Cafe Hon owner and "hon" trademarker Denise Whiting wants Baltimore to know she's sorry. Not sorry that she trademarked the town's classic term of endearment. Just sorry that she spoke about it so clumsily that her adopted hometown came to think of her as greedy. And sorry that nobody seemed to be listening a month ago, when she made basically the same apology in a letter to the editor in The Baltimore Sun. The newest apology came in the form of a news release Wednesday.

He's calling it the first shot fired in the Battle of the Hons. An area writer has thrown down the gauntlet — or is it a housecoat? — challenging the legitimacy of the three-letter trademark that has had Baltimore up in arms through the holiday season. Bruce Goldfarb, a Catonsville writer who runs the website "Welcome to Baltimore, Hon," plans to start selling coffee mugs emblazoned with the word "Hon. " He's doing it with hopes of proving that Denise Whiting, the founder of Honfest, the city's annual homage to an apocryphal Baltimore gal known for her beehive hairdo and cat's-eye glasses, has no legal claim on the word.

Not counting her seven custom-made beehive wigs, her cat's-eye glasses and her flamingo purse, Charlene Osborne holds little closer to her heart than the bedazzled rhinestone tiara that was fixed onto her lacquered bouffant as she was crowned Baltimore's Best Hon two years ago at Honfest. But this year, Honfest will be at least one beehive short. Osborne is among those who have pledged to boycott the annual event to protest what they consider to be the co-opting of a Baltimore institution: the fabled hon. "I consider myself a hon, raised by a real hon in Dundalk, which is hon territory," says Osborne, who's 49. "But I do not support the trademarking of the word and the strict handling of all things hon — it's very un-hon.

Cafe Hon owner and "hon" trademarker Denise Whiting wants Baltimore to know she's sorry. Not sorry that she trademarked the town's classic term of endearment. Just sorry that she spoke about it so clumsily that her adopted hometown came to think of her as greedy. And sorry that nobody seemed to be listening a month ago, when she said basically the same thing in a letter to The Baltimore Sun. The newest apology came Wednesday in the form of a news release. "I apologize to everyone in Baltimore for misspeaking," Whiting says in the release.

For the purposes of this editorial, we will refrain from using a three-letter expression in common parlance among Baltimoreans, particularly those of the waitressing profession, that starts with an "H," ends in an "N" and has an "uh" in the middle. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause to readers, but we would not want Café You-Know-What owner Denise Whiting to demand we turn over the entire press run of the newspaper, as she did with some unfortunate soul who was selling H-word paraphernalia at the airport a few years ago. We do, after all, still hope to make money from printing and selling papers, and we'd hate to run afoul of the trademark Ms. Whiting apparently so jealously guards.

After celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay and his show "Kitchen Nightmares"visited Cafe Hon last year, Denise Whiting agreed to kill her trademark of the word "Hon. " She did as she said. And yet, mention of the trademark appears in literature for this year's Honfest, which is coming up in June. Here is the passage, verbatim, included on Honfest 2012 material that was distributed to potential festival vendors: NOTE: All items sold at HONfest 2012 must be legal and within the family-oriented nature of the event.