You Can Google Bing, But Will You Bing Google?

Though he was the perpetrator of one of history's most heinous frauds, Charles Ponzi's swindle failed to gain him admission into one of humankind's most elite clubs. For "Ponzi" has never achieved higher status than that of mere adjective - as modifier of the noun "scheme." To gain admission to the lexicographical Olympus, his crime would have had to be so colossal that his name became a verb. The laurels for that achievement, like so many other dubious honors he has garnered, belong to Bernard Madoff. His scheme attains the distinction of becoming a verb, both transitive (to madoff) and intransitive (to be madoffed).

Even such distinguished brand names as Kleenex, Band-Aid and Frigidaire have been excluded from this pantheon. We do not Kleenex a nose, Band-Aid a wound, or Frigidaire a bottle of milk. But Madoff's notoriety entitles him to hobnob with the likes of Xerox and TiVo and...let's see, have I forgotten any others?

Ah yes. Google.

These ruminations were stimulated by an article in the New York Times by Miguel Helft about Microsoft's efforts to produce a search service so indomitable, so ubiquitous that the noun assigned to it - "Bing" - will in the phrase of the company's chief exec Steven A. Ballmer "verb up". Looking for the author of the poetic line "trailing clouds of glory" or the first son of Elector Ernst of the House of Wettin? Why, just bing it and you'll learn it's William Wordsworth and Friedrich the Wise respectively.

"Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on 'The Sopranos' but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the 'aha' moment when a search leads to an answer," writes Helft. Another Microsoft executive, Yusuf Mehdi, said that if MS's brandsmiths have done their job right, "bing" will become synonymous with “the sound of found”. We'll ignore the fact that "Bingo!" has been the sound of found since its the game was introduced in the United States 75 years ago.

Though boosted by an $80 to $100 million ad campaign and a “Bing-a-thon” on Hulu, Bing's verbward ascent will be arduous. Even in a fluid linguistic world where nouns morph into transitive verbs overnight - to impact, to message, to text - Google's preeminence dwarfs all competitors. Its name verbs up to Heaven itself, or at least to the next best thing to Heaven, the Oxford English Dictionary. OED conferred verbitude on the word in July 2006. (And by the way, "morph" and "dwarf" are nouns turned verbs too.)

You would think that the verbing up of your company name would be a little like entering Valhalla. Quite the opposite: it happens to be fraught with danger and you should be careful of what you wish for. Candace Lombardi, writing for CNET News, writes that "ubiquitous use of the company's name to describe something can make it harder to enforce a trademark. Bayer lost Aspirin as a U.S. trademark in 1921 after it was determined that the abbreviation for acetylsalicylic acid had become a generic term. The trademarks Band-Aid, Kleenex, Rollerblade and Xerox have had similar issues."

And Xerox? Many of us remember its advertising campaign urging us not to use its company name as a verb. We thought it was brilliant, reverse-psychology publicity. But apparently they weren't kidding. We owe it to a blogger, "ghouly05" writing on Yahoo, for an explanation of whether Xerox is a noun or a verb:

It is used as both, although the corporation does not really like that as they are afraid it will becoming a "generic" word for photocopy. This has happened with other brand names before (Kleenex comes to mind as a generic name for a tissue) and can be a legal problem for the parent company.

.... Though both are common, the company does not condone such uses of its trademark, and is particularly concerned about the ongoing use of Xerox as a verb as this places the trademark in danger of being declared a generic word by the courts. The company is engaged in an ongoing advertising and media campaign to convince the public that Xerox should not be used as a verb.

To this end, the company has written to publications that have used Xerox as a verb, and has also purchased print advertisements declaring that "you cannot 'xerox' a document, but you can copy it on a Xerox Brand copying machine". (Note that xerox is functionally a verb in this sentence.) Xerox Corporation continues to protect its trademark diligently in most if not all trademark categories. Despite their efforts, many dictionaries continue to mention the use of "xerox" as a verb, including the Oxford English Dictionary.

Could Google's trademark be threatened by its grammatical canonization? You can read one opinion that says absolutely. "Google does have something of a genuine concern, in as far as the inclusion of google as a verb does push it ever closer to becoming part of the general lexicon, and that would mean exclusion from legal protection for the trademark. The fact that Merriam-Webster's chose a lower case google, rather than the upper case OED usage, will ease the concern a tad."

So, maybe Microsoft shouldn't be so eager to verb up its search service. You can visit the Bing website and check it against its behemoth rival. If you're not sure how to find it on the Web, you can just do what I did: google it.

Richard Curtis