Did they want us to stop using it as a verb? : comments [A Bug's Life]

It's trademark law - so long as they can be seen to be defending their trademark against dilution, they get to keep it.

Excuse me, I have to go hoover the fridge.

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So the law requires risible and ineffectual bleating about inevitable language progression? Why am I not surprised :-) (I did know about the trademark thing really :-)

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It's one of those places where law and common sense meet, and neither exactly wins.

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What about John D. Loudermilk's song, Google Eye?
http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/g/googleeye.shtml
The word must have meant something before the ubiquitous search engine used it.

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I googled for 'Bellinghman' a while back. I discovered a reference to the US city Bellingham. Now, I can understand me making that typo, since I type my nickname more frequently than my actual surname, but for someone else to manage to mistype 'am' as 'man' is fairly impressive.

So, I wonder if it's even possible to make up a name that hasn't been used by someone, somewhere, sometime before, even if only accidentally.

(I suspect 'google' in those lyrics was intended as a semi-nonsense word.)

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I don't know the song, but when I saw that comment by

bugshaw I realised that I had heard the expression google-eyed on and off for a couple of decades at least, usually in the mouths of Americans. Perhaps a corruption of goggle?

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