Dear Google:
You should be honoured. Website names rarely get verbed. The only other ones I can think of are EBay, LiveJournal, and YouTube. Your predecessors, Yahoo and Altavista, didn't get to be verbs. Blogger doesn't get to be a verb because blog was already a verb when it was created. Even the venerable Amazon doesn't get to be a verb. Every person who verbs your name is another person who has you linked inextricably with search. It's free marketing, and testament to your permanent impact on society as a whole. Besides, there's no room for language police in the English language.
3 comments:
Yes, but "yahoo" was a famous literary noun (see Swift's Gulliver's Travels) before it became a famous dotcom domain name.
Yahoo tried to make itself a verb, as in "do you Yahoo!?" Must have seemed too forced to the dictionary people.
BTW, your reference to this item was the top blog link at The Washington Post website when I read the story. I thought maybe it's set up to make whichever blog that sends the reader to the Post show up as the top link, but I tried getting there via the second blog (sope-boks) link and yours was still listed first. Congrats, I guess.
See the screenshot:
http://i7.tinypic.com/24ypz4z.jpg
I'm sure it's just because mine was the most recent blog entry at the time. Now I'm #3, and as soon as someone else blogs about it I will be off the list. Technorati doesn't like to send people here unless it's absolutely necessary. Google, on the other hand, sends people here at the slightest provocation. But that still doesn't give them the right to be the language police :)
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