In the never ending battle for linguistic supremacy, we’ve had several word of the year proclamations and a list of banned words.  Pretty much every word society or organization looking to get a little free publicity releases something related to the English language.  We love our language and are surprisingly interested in its trends, even though most people ruin it with LOLspeak and text-typing.   However, this latest release from the American Dialect Society is fascinating, because the word of the decade for the 2000 era is actually a brand name.  Google is the word of the 00’s.

So why does Google as the word of the double-aughts interest me so much?  They’re not talking about Google the company, they’re talking about google the verb.  As in, go to the computer and google something.  If Google wasn’t omnipresent, they’d be in very serious danger of losing their trademark on the name, just like Xerox and Kleenex.

Tags: google, word of the decade, global language monitor, american dialect society, language, lexicon, google as a verb

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