The battle over Apple’s App Store trademark application is getting down to the nitty gritty as the two companies hire linguists to help them in the fight.

[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]Apple hired Robert Leonard who said the “App Store” term “was a proper noun and deserved to be trademarked, even though the words are generic when separated,” according to WSJ. As you might expect Microsoft’s linguist didn’t agree.

“The compound noun app store means simply ‘store at which apps are offered for sale,’ which is merely a definition of the thing itself — a generic characterization,” said Microsoft’s linguist, Ronald Butters.

In its filing, Apple used Microsoft’s Windows trademark against them.

“Having itself faced a decades-long genericness challenge to its claimed WINDOWS mark, Microsoft should be well aware that the focus in evaluating genericness is on the mark as a whole and requires a fact-intensive assessment of the primary significance of the term to a substantial majority of the relevant public,” says Apple in the filing. “Yet, Microsoft, missing the forest for the trees, does not base its motion on a comprehensive evaluation of how the relevant public understands the term APP STORE as a whole.”