Call me naive, but I like it when people I admire and respect keep on doing more things that make me admire and respect them. In most cases, I’ve been lucky. Even when my favourite musicians, authors, actors or even friends have done things I haven’t really appreciated on an aesthetic level, I’ve generally been able to rest easy in the confident assumption that they were being totally faithful to their principles.
So, what I’m ramblingly building up to is how utterly stoopid I think Google are being over this whole issue of the verb “to google” entering the lexicon.
I mean, what do they have to lose? Unless somehow the word comes to have negative connotations (unlikely as things stand) I fail to see how the absorption of “to google” into our stock of generic verbs can have any negative effect on the Google organisation. Are they worried that people will start googling on Altavista?