No "Ungoogleable" In Swedish Lexicon, Thanks to Google

jfruh writes "The Swedish Language Council is a semi-official, government funded body that regulates, cultivates, and tracks changes to the Swedish language. Every year it releases a list of new words that have crept into Swedish, and one of 2012's entries was 'ogooglebar' — 'ungoogleable,' meaning something that can't be found with a search engine. After Google demanded that the definition be changed and the Council add a disclaimer about Google's trademark, the Council has instead decided to remove the word from the list altogether."

Comments

A paradox?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Does that mean that the word "ogooglebar" suddenly became ungoogleable?

Re:A paradox?

[MightyYar]

Google would LOVE the free publicity from all of this: "Our product is so popular that we have to fight prevent dictionaries from including it! Bing doesn't have this problem."

The way trademark law works, you have to fight very hard to keep the word from becoming generic or you lose the trademark. Google is doing what any rational trademark holder would do.

Re:A paradox?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Google would LOVE the free publicity from all of this: "Our product is so popular that we have to fight prevent dictionaries from including it! Bing doesn't have this problem."

Oh, they do:

1.1 A heap or pile: formerly of stones, earth, trees, dead bodies, as well as of corn, potatoes, and the like

If you don't like it, "bing" also seems to be an onomatopoetic word for suddenness with the connotation of destructive change. I'm not quite sure if that's better for MS.

For those Curious

[Anonymous Coward]

For those curious to why Google raised a ruckus about this, there is a concept that once a word has become used in the more generic sense that the term may be used by other companies and the original company may lose their trademark rights . Xerox went through this in the 80's when Xerox was synonymous with photocopying... I remember my mom "Xeroxing" on the office machine even though it wasn't a Xerox. Xerox went through a significant ad campaign to get folks to change their behavior.

-- MyLongNickName

Re:Natural result of government power over somethi

[Kidbro]

You're vastly exaggerating their "corruption" here. They're not a language police[0]. They are simply making an observation about words they notice have popped up in common usage[1]. Nobody really cares about this list, people just read it for the curiosity value.

To make this clear, the final sentences in their own comment about the debacle translates roughly to: "Everybody's part of deciding what words are introduced in the language by choosing what words we use. If we want ogooglingsbar in the language we'll use the word and it is our use that is important - nothing a multinational company can change by coercion. The word is free![2]"

[0] If we have one, it's not them, but rather Svenska Akademien - the same folks that award the Nobel Prize in Literature.
[1] Not that I've ever actually heard ogooglingsbar it being used by anybody.
[2] A little word play there - "ordet är fritt", literally meaning "the word is free", is a Swedish expression used when you invite anybody present to speak their mind on something.

Re:I am OK with this

[jc42]

Actually, in this case it was silly to have any official recognition of the Swedish word "ogooglebar", just as it would be somewhat silly to consider whether "ungoogleable" should be recognized as an English word. Both words are formed by adding standard prefixes to the base word. Thus, "o-" + "google" + "-bar" is a standard Swedish construction, just as "un-" + "google" + "-able" is in English. Most dictionaries don't bother listing such words, since a moderately competent speaker of the language will know those prefixes and will construct such words routinely.

And note that, contrary to what some people have said, this wasn't done by a Swedish dictionary maker; it was a language "standards" committee. It is rather pointless (and silly) for such a committee to waste time with such questions. The "o-" and "-bar" affixes are already part of standard Swedish, and that's really all they should be concerned with. They might be concerned with whether "google" is listed as a verb in their list, but there's really little point in listing words constructed with standard affixes, unless the result has an idiomatic meaning that can't be deduced from its component morphemes.