Wednesday, August 16, 2006
"Help! I'm being verbalised." Google Boogle
Dear Google, First things first, what is the meaning of the term verbalised? Could you please google it and find out what kind of results the word throws up? While we do pride ourselves on knowing the meanings of most words, when it doubt we prefer to advise people to google things. We suspect googling is the best way to find out about anything. When you google for something, you not only get what you are looking for, you also end up being exposed to a whole bunch of wonderful new things. For instance, if you decide to google something up and enter the wrong spelling, Google will, very helpfully, ask you whether you were googling for something else. If you don't wish to google for something, you can always go for the 'I'm feeling lucky' option, which is a silly albeit fun option to googling something. We're quite amazed that you with a name like google has never thought of googling for most things in the world. Why come to us when you can simply google up the solutions to all your troubles? Unless you are The Google and are asking us to solve your problem with respect to people making a verb out of your very exclusive brand name. Ah, now we get the meaning of the word verbalise. So that is the matter we hear you, the Great One, are considering sueing people for. For using you as a verb? Are you? If so, we profusely apologise for misusing your brand name oh Great One. We also apologise for assuming you were a maverick company that didn't care for such silly things. We further apologise abjectly for thinking you were a company full of smart people who were smart enough to see the obvious benefits of letting your brand name become a generic verb. We instantaneously apologise for thinking you were savvy enough to know that history has shown that only the most popular and iconic brand names in history get...umm, verbalised. If you take our advice, we say you should be very happy that people are, as you would put it, verbalising your brand name. What that will do is even more firmly imprint your so very exclusive brand name in the people's minds and make it unforgettable and omnipotently inclusive. In the light of this proven finding we find it quite odd that you're asking for help with respect to this rather beneficial un-problem. Unless, of course, you're threatening to sue people only because you see this as a very smart way to stay in the public eye. Honestly Mr. Google we can think of much nicer ways you can try and stay in the public eye with. Come to think of it, we can't think of why you'd want to do anything to stay in the public eye. You don't see Apple threatening to sue Adam or, for that matter, God for using their brand name, do you? Don't you get it? People can't get enough of you. So much so, that people have turned you from a mere brand into an iconic verb. How cool is that? Very, very cool, we think. And very, very uncool, we think, of you to talk about such corporate and fuddy-duddy terms like sueing. If you don't desist from doing such things, you will very soon become the face of corporate shilliness and not the dream company that everybody wants to work for. Honestly, we'd so love to be verbalised. It would be so heady if people were to, some day, say they'd like 'to funcle' something up. Or if people were to say something like how they've been 'funcled'. Admittedly, at this point in time the verb 'to funcle' doesn't mean jackshit, but as more and more people start to google us up, we think the day is not far when we, too, shall be verbalised. In the meantime, we suggest you do something useful like, perhaps, google "google" to see what gets googled up. Thank you for your time. And no thanks for wasting ours with your shillanthropy. Oh yes, in case you do not know the meaning of 'shilliness' and 'shillanthropy', please google it. It'll show up as one among the 1364 neoligisms that some jobless wordsmiths from India have thought up. And yes, please feel free to sue us. We, more than you, could certainly do with the free publicity. Yours verbally, Funcle.