With the recent merger between the Alliance and the PCs, some people are wondering if members of the new Conservative Party of Canada should be called Tories.

One of the first journalists I heard raise this was a colleague, Dan Brown, who wrote a column about it last month. He interviewed some politicians and academics about the label Tory, including a Canadian lexicographer.

As Brown pointed out, the word's roots are believed to be Irish. Toraidhe, which meant "pursuer," originally referred to highway robbers in the 1600s. The term entered political parlance and gradually lost its pejorative overtone. Tory was eventually applied to Conservatives in Britain and, during the 19th century, to those in Canada as well.

The debate centres on whether the nickname suits a new Canadian party made up largely of disenchanted federal Tories – rebels who left the old Progressive Conservative fold more than a decade ago to form a new, western-based movement initially called the Reform party.

Since they didn't want to be Tories back then, it's argued, we dare not call them that now. In fact, some members of the splinter group actually used the word Tory derisively when attacking their old party, the PCs, over the years. Shocking partisanship in a fight to win seats in the Commons.

So even though these MPs recently voted to brand themselves "Conservatives" again, we should avoid calling them "Tories" because it might upset them, according to this logic. There's also the danger of confusing sleepy voters.

PROGRESSIVES AND OTHER PROGRESSIONS

But are these reservations sensible? Even before the Alliance and PC caucuses formally merged this month, Alliance MPs officially changed their political affiliations to "Conservative" – a move recorded by the Parliament of Canada's website.

So it's now Conservative MP Stephen Harper, and Conservative MP Stockwell Day, and Conservative MP Peter MacKay all the way down the list. They're not members of an Alliance-Conservative party or a Conservative-Alliance party. They're with the Conservative Party of Canada, which has been registered with Elections Canada.

Although fierce battles over policy and strategy may lie ahead, to the average voter the brand name itself is indistinguishable from the old Progressive Conservative Party of Canada – which most people simply called the federal Conservative party or the Tory party for decades.

Once we get used to hearing former Alliance members identified as Conservative MPs, it's not a stretch to assume that the familiar label Tory will regain currency. (Headline writers alone won't be able to resist the four-letter word, given the lengthy alternative.)

Is this a bad thing? It reminds us of the party's past. After all, most Alliance members used to be Tories, including Harper who once worked for a Conservative MP. And historically, the word has been tied to a name, not a specific election platform. The old Progressives were not Tories until joining the Conservatives in 1942.

It's impossible to predict the path English will take. A minority may want certain words or phrases to catch on, including, say, a Canadian-born replacement for Tory. (Snide critics have proposed that "Conservatives" be shortened to "Cons.") But in the end it's up to the masses to decide what survives in the evolving body of everyday English.

BRANDS, LABELS, MARKS (AND MARX)

A far more interesting question about a political moniker was supposed to be settled by a judge. Canadian word buffs looked forward to the case, which promised to be entertaining. But it will never go to court now. That's because when former Alliance leader Harper and former PC leader MacKay struck a deal to merge their parties last fall, they also quietly settled a sort of copyright squabble over the term Conservative.

In 2000, the PCs boiled when the old Reform party changed its name to the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance. The original choice was the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance. But when "p" for "party" was tacked on the end it produced a rather stinky acronym (CCRAP), so before long Reform moved to the left, so to speak.

The Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance soon became known as the Canadian Alliance, or just the Alliance. But the PCs still didn't like the long and rarely used official name, and demanded that the word Conservative be dropped altogether.

The Progressive Conservatives recounted with pride the founding of Canada under Sir John A. Macdonald in 1867, which was rather rich because the PCs didn't even exist until the 1940s. (They emerged from a marriage between what remained of Macdonald's old party – actually called Liberal-Conservatives at Confederation – and straggling supporters of the virtually lifeless Progressive Party of Canada, which had begun as a protest movement in the West in the 1920s.)

Canada's chief electoral officer sided with the Alliance, but the PCs continued to press. Legal action was launched, and the dispute remained unresolved for years.

Warner Brothers tried something equally wacky with a "C word" once. Its legal department sent threatening letters to Groucho Marx at the end of the Second World War, demanding that the soon-to-be-shot picture A Night in Casablanca be renamed because the title was too similar to the 1942 movie Casablanca. Groucho wrote back, claiming that the Marx Brothers had first dibs on the word Brothers.

The lawyers representing Warner Brothers didn't get the joke and insisted on a complete summary of the film. Groucho responded with an outlandish plot about a priest selling can openers and a messenger boy running "Riot," a nightclub on the edge of town. Confused, the lawyers requested further details. Groucho invented more zany stuff. Warner Brothers never wrote back.

"I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo," Groucho noted wryly. "I don't know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try."

Casablanca – released the same year the Conservatives added "Progressive" to their name – ends with Humphrey Bogart uttering the now-famous line, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." Many MPs have been saying similar things since the PCs and the Alliance joined forces.

It's too soon to tell if the Tory tag will stay attached to the new Conservative Party of Canada. But the legal spat over who can call themselves a Conservative on Parliament Hill officially ended with the merger. And it won't be long before members of the united right look to voters, not courts, for judgment of another kind.