The Swedish Language Council wanted to list ‘ungoogleable’ as a new word. Google didn’t like it. “The word was to be used to describe something ‘that you can’t find on the web with the use of a search engine’, according to the Language Council. However, Google was less than thrilled that a word based on its name had been highlighted by Sweden’s ‘official language cultivation body’. Google wanted the council to specify that the word’s definition only covered searches performed using Google, and not searches involving other search engines.” Sadly, the Council decided to scrap the word altogether. Google, get your filthy paws off our languages. It seems like large corporations love to exert pressure on language – Apple tried something similar a few years ago with the abbreviation ‘app’, something which I exposed for the idiocy that it was. I will use whatever words I damn well please, and so should everyone else. The Swedish Language Council shouldn’t even have acknowledged Google’s ridiculous request with a response.
The issue isn’t that Google wants to prevent an unflattering use of their trademark, it’s that they want to prevent any form of their trademark from becoming a generic word.
In US Trademark Law (any many others), if your trademark (like aspirin, escalator, thermos, zipper, etc.) because a common noun or verb, you lose your rights to the trademark.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
As mentioned in the article, Google has also fought against “to google” being a verb meaning “to search online”, even though at first glance it seems like a huge win for them for their name to synonymous with online searching.
Ungoogleable has both a suffix and affix, changing the word substantially from Google’s trademark. On top of that, it is none of the Language Council’s concern what Google wants to protect or not. Google is free to spout nonsense, but the Swedes shouldn’t have caved in.
I disagree that its substantially different from Google’s trademark, but that isn’t even the real issue as far as I am concerned.
Language Council? *That* is the body telling everyone what words people can and cannot use. Languages should be defined by the speakers, which means that new words will arise and fall, grammar will change. Having a language defined by any other means is a Sisyphean task.
No, a langauge council doesn’t tell what we can use – they just keep track of stuff. Dutch has one too, and they act ‘after the fact’; so, people make up new stuff or alter language in daily speech, and they keep track of it.
Then what does it matter what the language council decides?
Edit: I’m more familiar with the French equivalent which as far as I know, tries to define what French is rather than just documenting convention.
Edited 2013-03-26 17:59 UTC
Because it acts as a record of the evolving nature of a language. A history book of language, if you will. You may not find that important, but someone like me, who earns his living with language and has studied it all his life, this is of great importance.
A corporation should not be able to dictate such a history book.
I think they should be able to if it is, or is similar to, the very name they trade under.
You mean ‘Apple’ or ‘Windows’, right?
Yeah, I’m not nearly into spoken languages as you are. I think what you’re complaining about is the devaluing of the importance and relevance of the “official history” of the language. That kind of makes sense.
If it does what Google tells it to, it doesn’t act like a record, it claims to act like a record. The fault is the council’s.
Thom, you said it yourself. The council made the decision, not Google. Google just voiced an objection. What Google actually wanted was for the meaning to be unsearchable on Google, which kind of makes sense. In the end, it was the council’s choice to just drop the matter.
True, but one, he might be disappointed at Google making the objection, but more likely disappointed that the language council caved in.
The point the Swedish Language Council made in their comment on this is that anyone searching for the word ‘ogooglebar’ will find the meaning Google doesn’t like, as well as commentary about the controversy. That would seem to serve the purpose.
Here’s a quick, rough and ready translation of the crucial three paragraphs of their statement:
The full statement (in Swedish) is here:
http://www.sprakradet.se/15922
Lets hope that every Swedish citizen freely uses the word anyway and f**k Google.
Let’s be clear, the issue you have a problem with is trademark law.
Clearly, being a writer yourself, this is a topic close to your heart, but I think you’re letting your corporate-paranoia and profession cloud your judgment here. That is, unless you honestly believe that governments have the right to abuse internationally recognised trademarks just for the sake of adding one arbitrary word to a list that nobody apart from writers take seriously?
If this had been a government stepping in and preventing a company from using a specific word as a trademark, then you’d be the first to complain about censorship, yet that’s what this amounts to in the long run (thanks to the weird way how trademark law operates).
But this isn’t about governments. This is a committee of Swedish linguists, who’re basically the Swedish equivalents of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary and Fowler’s Modern English Usage rolled in one. The government has funded them since 1972 (because, unlike the OED, they don’t have the support of a rich and solvent university), but even so all they do is record what usage is. They don’t try to determine usage should be. Or, to put it differently, they’re descriptive linguists, not normative linguists, and they’re linguists, not bureaucrats or government apparatchiks. The Swedish government no longer tries to determine what Swedish should look like, thank G-d, and SprÃ¥krÃ¥det’s nyordlistan isn’t a list of neologisms they’ve coined or which the government has coined – it’s a list of words that’ve come into common usage in the past year, or that’ve been particularly newsworthy in the past year.
So what has happened here is that some Swedes (mostly ordinary teens, incidentally, not writers) have started using ‘ogooglebar’ to mean something. Google’s argument is, in essence, that Swedish dictionaries should be prevented from recording the actual use of words in the Swedish language. I find that very odd. Trademark law is not intended to prevent dictionaries from recording actual word usage, but that’s the effect Google’s action has had.
You mean ‘unsearchable’ is too difficult? Oh no, what will I ever do if words aren’t consistently replaced with new synonyms that contain corporate logos and names instead. Aluminum foil? You mean Reynolds wrap, right? Or how about calling all soda’s coke (which is done in certain regions)? And now a company wants to stop the conflation of their trademarked name with a language’s official dictionary? Such vile evil infringements on our freedumbz!
Unsearchable in swedish = osökbar which means it it not defined to web searches but by definition impossible to search for at all. And not even the meaning of life is impossible to search for, it is just that many people find different answers.
Ogoogelbar/ogoolebar means it is impossible to find on google, and if that means bing as well in swedish means very little as bing and the others search engine marketshare over there for personal use is miniscule.
It’s not a good one because the Swedish Language Council invents silly new words on daily basis with no respect to the language at all. They are a bunch of left-wing liberals that deserves to be smacked down!
I’m glad google told them to stuff it.
There is normally no authority that decides words as existing or having a certain meaning. The most recognition a word can get is usually getting in a dictionary. If a word gets used often enough there is nothing an institution can do but acknowledge it (which adds zero value to it being in a dictionary).
Beyond that an institution _can_ advocate usage of a word. It is here that I would ask this institution, not Google, to leave me alone to use whatever I want.
That said, no corporation would have acted differently from Google. If they did they would rightfully be called incompetent. Maybe I would be offended if trademark law wasn’t so stupid in this regard.
Well it is like in English with Oxford vs Cambridge Dictionaries.
Oxford spelling uses z in civilization where Cambridge uses the s. However colour is still spelled with the “u”.
Edited 2013-03-26 18:35 UTC
They both misspell “color”?!?
(*ducks*)
The irony (or is it hypocrisy?) being that Google took their name by misspelling a term invented by somebody else (Googol).
What a “brave” new world is becoming; Even language is starting to be under corporate control…
The other version of the story is that when they got to get funding they called it “googleplex” which is a very large number and the investor wrote the check to google after they misheard it.
That’s an urban myth. Google was their name even back when it was still an academic project as a .stanford.edu subdomain.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
In any case, corporations controlling language is an awful thing.
I expect it to be, though I do like to think that they came up with a overblown name and the exec cocked it up and it became such a well known brand.
Yeah, reminds me of when McDonalds tried to change the definition of ‘McJob’.
Google has always asked people not to ‘Google’ for things, but rather ‘Search’ for them; at least they are consistent in asking people to not use their name as such.
Come on Thom, you’re overholwerdaizing !
You Hoover up.
If you need to you might take an Aspirin.
You go online and Google for cheap FCUK …..perhaps
As much as Google might ‘feel the need’ to protect against generic trademarks, they don’t have a right to interfere in the work of the Swedish Language council any more than they do the work of the OED or others. Like Thom and other have said, they’re only recording current and passing language usage patterns. That’s it.
Edited 2013-03-26 23:57 UTC
…you need to find different ones, or redefine your definition of friendship.
I see a lot of people acting towards *oogle like a victim of domestic abuse: “Oh, you know, when he’s not drunk (on power), he’s so good to me…I could never leave him…(nervously and unconsciously touches bruising around eye…).”
Soon *oogle will be in a position where you’ll never be able to leave (*oogle *lass), will always be able to find your refuge and haul you back ‘home’.
A plea to its founders: pull the plug on the monster you have created.
Orf.
“I will use whatever words I damn well please…”
Good to see you use ‘damn’ at least for once. And let’s hope your silly ‘heck’ will get replaced by ‘hell’.
I think the fact that such a word like “ungoogleable” appeared is a small rot in a language. There is no need such words like the one we are talking about. You can express yourself with the currently known words and such words like “ungooglable” is the product of laziness. Of course the “google it” expression already exists but I think everybody associate it with an online search not Google. I can not speak on behalf of people of Sweden but I would hate a word like “ungooglable” in my language, by the way I am Hungarian. If a language council would concerned about the language it would let this abomination sink into oblivion, and would not try to legalize it.
There is no word for it though, and people do already say ungoogleable (or however one would spell it in english). It is not like the word can’t be dropped from dictionaries again if it falls out of favor.
I completely disagree with Thom.
If no-one body guides the language, then all languages will quickly end up like the shit, that is the English language. There are no rules, it’s a frikkin mess!
Teenagers will be setting the language of the future, and their motivation is seriously fubar. Their goal is to not sound like old people, so use any words that distinguish themselves from the previous generation. Sadly, these people still don’t have enough knowledge to know a languages rules, and therefore in my opinion should not be setting the agenda.
/Uni
You realize this has always been the case, right?
Officials from Microsoft reportedly offered to allow the use of an alternative term, though their offer was rejected… possibly because the proposed alternative was created by the same people responsible for Microsoft’s recent product names:
“unbingdotcombroughttoyoubymicrosoftwindows8rt-able”
I believe it’s unfair to compare this case to Apple’s use of the word App. Google is the company’s actual name (obviously), whereas App is/was already a common word prior to Apple’s use of it.
As for generic trademarks, I don’t believe it matters if they use a prefix or affix, or both. Either way you still have the same root word.