Just a month or so ago, a brand — high on hype and no stranger to marketing mishaps — announced an objectively beautiful watch with what it called a “new old-stock” movement. It even went so far as to put it in the model’s name. Up until that point, I had been under the impression that NOS indicated an old movement, hence the “old” part. But the movement in question was a Miyota that had been discontinued barely two years prior and from a movement family still very much in production. To me, calling a recently discontinued caliber “NOS” seemed at least unclear, if not intentionally misleading — two descriptors that are more commonly applicable than I’d prefer.

Broadly speaking, “new old-stock” with regard to watch movements can be defined as any movement that has never been used and is no longer in production. To parse the term further, “old” modifies “stock,” while “new” modifies the “old stock.” That is, the stock — the movement — must be old but in new condition. I talked to a number of fellow watch nerds about this and I couldn’t find a single one who would ever think to give the NOS label to a two-year-old movement that was part of an extant caliber family.

But there’s a difference between the spirit of a term and the letter of that term, between connotation and denotation. Definitions are necessarily limiting and fail to capture nuance, implications, and expectations. It’s not just that something NOS should be properly old (I’ll let you decide how old, but certainly more than 10 years, I’d think), but I also feel like it indicates venerability or distinguishment. There’s an analog here with the state of Virginia’s historic vehicle tags: “If you own a passenger vehicle, trailer, semi-trailer or motorcycle with a model year that is more than 25 model years old before January 1 of the current calendar year, you’ve got an antique!” As a result of this broad policy, I’ve seen countless piece-of-trash cars with tags declaring the vehicle an antique. Maryland lowers the threshold to 20 years and goes so far as to use the word historic on the plate. But both stumble into the same pitfall that NOS has, failing to capture the full weight of “historic” or “antique.”

A state government, of course, is free to set its standards as it pleases and isn’t beholden to market forces on such matters. That is, such an entity isn’t misleading anyone with those tags because it is setting the definition of the word as used. That’s the other issue at hand with this recent NOS claim. Given that the term is understood by most, if not all, to have certain connotations, and would almost surely not include the Miyota movement in question, the brand has been misleading in its marketing. This is nothing new; brands do this all the time. We’re all more than ready to attack any brand that muddies the term “in-house” with dubious claims. Yet the brazen misuse of “NOS” is somehow more offensive, perhaps because of its novelty. We’ve tested and established the malleability of “in-house” and established the norms and expectations around its use, but we’ve done no such thing with “new old-stock.” I imagine this is because no one expected to need to sort it out, as everyone was pretty clear on what it meant — though I also imagine people were pretty clear on what “in-house” meant until someone tried to get crafty. It’s the knowing misuse that presents the issue, never mind what’s being misused.

There are plenty of brands that have used “new old-stock” or something like it in a way that is congruent with the accepted meaning of the term (with all its nuances). To be sure, it is these watches that have helped to delineate what the term means. I’m talking about Worn & Wound’s collaboration with Nivada Grenchen and Meraud’s use of the Landeron 248. There are also brands like Welsbro and Lang 1943 that have refurbished and refinished old movements that were never used but may have needed some TLC. This is all objectively above board. None of the brands is trying to pull a fast one and pass something off or even gently test the limits of horological nomenclature.

Brands are not ignorant. Brands that claim “in-house” without the work to back it up know what they’re doing. A brand that misuses NOS knows what it’s doing. People with Antique or Historic vehicle tags that drive 1992 Toyota Tercels, however minty, know they don’t have a car that lives up to those words. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples (within and outside of horology), and I hope you’ll share them in the comments below. Personally, I feel a sense of obligation when I see this type of behavior; if I (and others) say nothing, a precedent of acceptability will be established, and the behavior will creep its way across the industry. I hope you feel the same obligation, if not necessarily with the same indignation. The horological mire is like a tar pit: If we don’t intervene promptly and at the first sign, that thing we wish to rescue or preserve will be stuck forever.