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Using Google as a verb is a tradition as old as Google’s tradition of avoiding taxes.
Like emo bands, all-denim outfits, and standing on rubble, googling found its way into popular
culture in the early 2000s—famously, it was first used on television in 2002 on an
episode of the newly problematic Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that same year the American
Dialect Society ranked “google” as the most useful word of 2002, not to be confused
with the most useful bird of 2002, which was obviously the vulturine guineafowl. Just look
at that plumage—that is a hot bird. By 2006, google had been added to Oxford English Dictionary,
as a verb, under the definition: “To use the Google search engine to find information
on the Internet.” Soon, other brands even tried to get in on the action, leading to
a 2010 episode of the TV show Hawaii Five-0 where a character says not-at-all-casually,
“You don’t believe me? Bing it,” in the most awkward piece of product placement
until this exact mention of top-rated VPN provider ExpressVPN, available with three-months
free at expressvpn.com/hai. Now, at first glance, you might think that the widespread
use of google as verb would be great news for google: but as Nicolas Cage and Type 2
diabetes have taught us, you can have too much of a good thing… because it turns out
that this gaggle of googling is threatening Google’s trademark.
The 1976 Lanham Act, which governs US trademark, states that, “no incontestable right shall
be acquired in a [trade]mark which is the common descriptive name of any article or
substance, patented or otherwise.” That’s basically fancy talk for you can’t trademark
a name if it’s the commonly used term for a type of thing, the reason being that for
something to qualify as a trademark it must be “distinctive,” which is defined as
“having the capacity for identifying and distinguishing particular goods as emanating
from one producer or source and not another.” In a nutshell, this why you can’t trademark
the term “garbage,” as that commonly describes all trash, but you can trademark the term
“Taco Bell’s Naked Chicken Chalupa” as that clearly references a specific type
of trash made by a specific company. And this is where big business boys can run into big
business problems—if their trademark becomes so widely used that it no longer clearly identifies
something as their product, but instead is used as the general term for that type of
product, they can lose their trademark. One of the earliest examples of this is the
word escalator—you know, the things people stand side-by-side on like psychopaths, slowing
everyone down and causing unimaginable human suffering when they could just as easily stand
on the right and walk on the left. And don’t you dare fact-check me with that study saying
standing on both sides is faster overall because of more throughput capacity—Wikipedia says
that’s wrong. Escalator was a trademark of the Otis Elevator Company since its debut
at the 1900 Paris Exposition, and for the first 50 years of the escalator’s existence,
anytime somebody other than the Otis Elevator Company wanted to sell the world’s lamest
ride, they had to call it “motorstairs” or an “electric stairway.” The problem
was, motorstairs never caught on with the public—regardless of what company had made
the steppy human conveyor belt, people called them all escalators, which is why in 1950,
a court ruled in Haughton Elevator Co. v. Seeberger that the word escalator had “become
recognized by the general public as the name for a moving stairway, as the result of the
registrant’s course of conduct causing the mark to lose significance as an indication
of origin, and registration is thereof cancelled.” This process, of losing a trademark to widespread
use, has the forgettable MCU villain-sounding name “genericide,” and like forgettable
MCU villains, there are a lot of examples: dumpster was once the trademark of the Dempster
Brothers, zipper was a trademark of B.F. Goodridge, flip phone was trademarked by Motorola, and
there are a ton more: aspirin, yo-yo, teleprompter, super glue, dry ice, laundromat, videotape,
and even heroin, which was once a trademark of Bayer.
And seeing as Google only wants to be like heroin in terms of the YouTube algorithm’s
addictive power, not in terms of trademark genericide, the company has been sending out
cease and desist letters to people who misuse google since 2003. Their first went to a blogger
who ran a site tracking neologisms and claimed the term “googling” was starting to be
used to generically refer to web searching—and amidst their legal threat, they even included
a helpful guide to proper usage, which included this, 100% real, example:
“Appropriate use: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party.
Inappropriate
use: I googled that hottie.” In addition to not wanting you googling hotties,
Google also wouldn’t want you to say that hotties are “ungoogleable”—unless you
mean it literally. The Swedish Language Council learned that the hard way in 2013, when they
attempted to define “ungoogleable” or “ogooglebar” as “[Something] that you
can't find on the web with the use of a search engine," resulting in a cease-and-desist letter
from Google, who complained that the definition’s said “a search engine” and not “the
Google search engine.” In the end, though, even if Google does manage
to protect their legal right to their trademark, they still shouldn’t be feeling too lucky—after
all, there are a ton of trademarks that are still legally enforceable, but are nonetheless
widely used as a generic term, which has taken away much of the trademark’s value. For
proof, just look at ChapStick, which is still a trademark owned by Pfizer. The thing is,
though, no matter what waxy tube I rub on my dry smackers, even if it’s Burt’s Bees
or Blistex, I’m probably still gonna call it chapstick.
And there are tons more: most people know about Kleenex, Band-Aid, and Xerox, but what
about Styrofoam, Bubble Wrap, Jet Ski, Lava Lamp, Q-Tips, and Rollerblades? Unless your
favorite social networking site is also the Wikipedia page “List of generic and genericized
trademarks,” you probably didn’t know that those are all still legally enforceable
trademarks owned by specific companies—which is exactly why they aren’t particularly
valuable anymore. But it’s not all bad news for Google: they
still control 90% of online search, plus your email probably, and they can track everything
you do on your smartphone—which actually, wait, seems… bad. Big tech makes a lot of
their money off of your data, so it’s probably time to put some protection between your online
activity and these companies, and that's why I use ExpressVPN. When you run ExpressVPN
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All due respect (great video as always), google can kiss my ass
What's the music in the background at the beginning?
what was the video that had fun making of 2A?