uptodate3 to google transcript, Languages, English, Learning, bbc, BBC Radio Learning, words in the news, keep ypur ... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Keep your English up to date
To google
Professor David Crystal
To google – as a verb. Of course, everybody’s heard of
Google the search engine – popular development of the
1990s. In fact, in 1999, Google was designated the most
useful word by the American Dialect Society, as a verb!
‘I’m going to google.’ ‘We are googling.’ And, of course,
there’s all sorts of associated words that have come since –
you know, ‘we are googlers, if we google!’ And people who
google a lot are ‘google-minded’, and I suppose there are
lots of other coinages too.
The word itself comes from a mathematical term, ‘googol’,
a term meaning 10 to the 100
th
power, an impossibly large
concept, indeed. And, of course, the Google search engine
has also become impossibly large! When you go searching
for a word on Google, you might get a million hits, or 10
million hits, or a hundred million hits.
Of course, the penalty of success is when you have a word
enter the language and it was originally a word that you
thought you owned. In fact, the firm Google is very concerned over this
use as a verb, because it is their trade mark – they like to keep the
capital letter in the definition, for example – if you use it, they say, do
use it with a capital ‘G’. But they’ve got a problem, I mean, no firm, no
matter how big, can control language change!
They’re not the first firm to be worried about this sort of thing. Xerox,
once upon a time, was very worried about the way their name had
become part of the language as a whole, you know, ‘I’m going to xerox
something’, meaning – I’m going to photocopy something. And Hoover
was another one, you know, it now means any sort of vacuum cleaner. Of
course, Hover is a particular brand of vacuum cleaner. So Google are a bit
worried about this use of their name as a verb, but they won’t be able to
stop it. As I say, no firm, no matter how big, can control language
change.
© British Broadcasting Corporation 2008
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]