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| I Google, you Google, she Googles, they Google… |
May 7, 2004 |
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By Gail Balfour<br><br>Do you like to party? Some of us still remember when a party was something people attended or threw — not something people actually went out and did. Now, the same social shift from noun to verb can be observed in the über engine Google.<br>
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“Googling” isn’t the only new high-tech verb that started life as a noun: the same can be said for texting, keyboarding, mousing — even computing itself. However, Google stands apart from these, according to Jack Chambers, a socio-linguistics professor at the University of Toronto.<br>
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“Google started out as a proper noun, but then it began to be used as a common noun. Now it’s starting to be used as a common verb,” he said, adding that this is a similar situation to the one Xerox has with its photocopiers — people use the term “xeroxing” when making copies, despite the fact that the company itself discouraged this. “You would think that the holder of the copyright would like the free advertising.<br>
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But there is always opposition to this kind of thing,” Chambers said. “For example, in some places Coca Cola is such a commonly known brand that the word ‘Coke’ has become generic for pop. A ‘coke’ can be a ginger ale or a cola. Now the same thing is starting to happen with Google.”<br>
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The problem with “Google” and “Googling” becoming very common terms is that the meaning may be diluted or blurred, he said. The technology behind the word becomes less important than the word itself. And the word itself starts to be defined and redefined by the people who use it — meaning the company that created it loses control.<br>
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A noun typically starts being used as a verb when the activity described by the noun has firmly established itself as a customary practice, Chambers said. This is a linguistic process known as a “functional shift.<br>
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”In fact, it’s a popular belief that you are getting near the Zeitgeist when this happens. “Zeitgeist” defines the spirit of the time; the taste and outlook characteristic of an era or a generation. It comes from the German words “zeit” (time) and “geist” (spirit). So, “partying” certainly qualifies in this definition. But does Google?“It’s getting there. And if Microsoft doesn’t buy (Google), it will get there,” said Loren Hicks, CIO of Lavalife Inc., an Internet personals company.<br>
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Back when he was an early rider on the Internet wave, Hicks typically used various search engines to check out the same terms, and often the results differed substantially from one engine to the next. “But lately I can’t remember the last time I searched for anything except with Google,” he said.<br>
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Even though Hicks uses Google several times a day, he said he was surprised to learn during a recent conversation at work that not everyone has heard of the search engine.<br>
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“I was astonished — I thought everyone lived and breathed Google,” he said. “It’s also hard for me to imagine people not being on the ’net — that’s been hard for me to imagine for a long time.”<br>
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But that may be a North American perception, as the ubiquity of Google actually varies greatly by Web adoption, as well as by country and language. <br>
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The English language is “more pliable and resilient — more absorbent than other languages,” Chambers said. “It’s well adapted to creating new nouns and verbs.<br>
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”This may be one reason people find English a difficult second language to learn, said Larry Callaghan, a Toronto-based ESL instructor who spent many years teaching English in Japan. He said that although his students tend to use many English phrases, “Googling” isn’t typically one of them — at least not yet.<br>
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“Yahoo! is still the most popular search engine over there in Japan, followed by Google,” he said.<br>
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According to Chambers, the term “Yahooing” sounds funny to our ears, but that’s only because we’re not used to hearing it. “Googling” would sound just as weird if we had never heard it before. Ironically enough, Yahoo! actually tried to get people to use its name as a verb — without much success. Remember the “Do you Yahoo?” ads? Unfortunately for Yahoo!, an advertising campaign alone cannot create a functional shift, Chambers said. “If it could, it would be a huge position of power. But only people can determine how language gets used — and nobody knows what they will choose next or why,” he said.<br>
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“Why did it happen with Google? Why didn’t it happen for Yahoo!? We will never know how a word catches the fancy. There’s an element of fashion — something in the wind.”
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