Do you Yahoo!? That's a good question. Apparently, most people Google. Some estimate that as much as 75% of traffic to websites from search engines comes from Google searches. So, things are pretty good for Google: perhaps, too good. What happens when nearly everyone in the world googles? I thought it was about time that we googled to find out.

Google has its language police out in force to ensure that dictionaries don't recognize google as a verb. Apparently, Google asked their word spies to track down anyone who says they can google. In the result, Word Spy was googled by the trademark lawyers, who discovered that google is listed there as a verb. The shit hit the fan.

Google's problem is not a new one. Many well known brands vociferously resist any attempt by linguists to use their trademarks to describe things generically. Some even threaten customers who use their precious brand names to verbalize the activities associated with the use of those very products. A kleenex is not just any tissue. A xerox is not a photocopy. Rollerblade is not something you can do on inline skates. In fact, you can't even call inline skates made by Rollerblade, rollerblades. And, even if it absolutely positively has to be there overnight, for gawdsake don't FedEx it! Perhaps, the greatest generic hijacking of a brand was experienced by Hormel, which still wants us to love spam.

Google is said to be a play on "googol" the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros, a reference to organizing the seemingly infinite Web. Imagine how different the world would be if founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had branded their search engine by its original nickname, BackRub. They surely would not be working in the Googleplex, which the head office of Google Inc. is actually called. Could it be that these trademark fanatics plagiarized that term? Googleplex is also used in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, in which one of Deep Thought's designers asks, "And are you not," said Fook, leaning anxiously forward, "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?" Today, the Googleplex is where Googlers work and play. So, I ask, "Do Googlers google?"

All's fair. If Google can have Googlers, we all can be googlers. That said, google is one of my favorite words. It has given rise to a rich lexicon of googlewords: googlewhack; googlewash; googlism; and, in a terrorism obsessed world, the googlebomb. The ultimate WMD or weapon of mass dyslexia is elgoog, which was developed so that people in the People's Republic of China can google even though their assholes of evil government tried to block Google. Even Google hasn't missed the opportunity to coin their own verbage, allowing the Googlers to speak a new e-commerce word... er, trademark. Froogle. It's all so googlicious, if you ask me.

Let's hope that the pettifoggers at Google don't have the last word on how we are permitted to speak English. It's just not cricket if we can't use words like googly. The intellectual property lawyers at Google should just take a valium.