Microsoft is striking terror into the hearts of prescriptive grammarians everywhere by suggesting that millions of people could start using the word Bing (the recently unveiled latest-and-greatest search engine from Microsoft) as a verb in everyday speech.
And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”
One of the oft-cited reasons for Google's success, other than the fact that it offered a decent ground floor product at a time when the world was full of search engine suckery, is that it had a name which was susceptible to being immortalized as a household verb. To Google is to search the web, and to search the web is to Google.
Microsoft desperately wants this for Bing.
And I'm sure they thoroughly focus-grouped and psychology-tested and committee-reviewed the name ad infinitem/absurdum. At this level, the billions of dollars level, you don't draw names out of a hat. So the name went through the review and acceptance process and the experts pulled out their pocket protectors and proclaimed that YES, Bing is a GOOD NAME!
The only problem is, the experts were wrong.
While I won't go so far as to say that Bing is a stupid-ass name for a search engine, I will say that as a label for a mass-market search product, Bing sucks like a bag of three-day-old cheese puffs. And by the way: I like Microsoft. I've been using Microsoft technologies my entire adult life. That doesn't make the choice of "Bing" as a cultural moniker any less daft.
Allow me to explain.
First: it's monosyllabic. It's short, but it doesn't roll off the tongue, unless you define "rolling" to be what happens when you drop the Oxford English Dictionary on the floor. Say both of the following phrases out loud:
- Google it!
- Bing it!
There's an unnatural strain on the word "Bing". When you say I binged the Superbowl out loud, it sounds like I BINGED the Superbowl. It's not possible to speak the word "Bing" as a verb without speaking it in ALL CAPS. It's explosive and short, and this makes it awkward in casual speech. The word "Google" manages to avoid this strain because its two rapid-fire syllables give the tongue something trochaic to bounce across.
Second: it's a little dorky. When a person says "I Google stuff all the time" it has a neutral or even slightly positive connotation, of curiosity and basic computer prowess intermixed with sure, a little light geekery. But when a person says "I bing stuff all the time"...let's face it, that person is probably a dweeb. At least, I personally would feel like a dweeb if I were the constantly-Binging type. But I'm not; I Google; and I can say that with zero embarassment; and this is a huge problem for Bing.
Third: if I ever had to tell someone I binged their mother, I'd feel a little dirty. Maybe it's my oversexed geek mind, or maybe it's because bing is one vowel away from bang. Eitherwhichwaysoever, the word bing strikes me as sexually suggestive when applied to a person of the opposite sex. Neologistically speaking, Bing works equally well as the name of a family-friendly search engine or a synonym for fornicate. Bonus points...if you're 14.
Fourth: the word's greatest success in the English language to date has been the phrase "bada-bing". There's also the Bing cherries thing and Bing Crosby and bingo and bling but come on...when you hear the word BING...
...fuggeddaboutit.
Fifth: the past tense of "bing" is "binged". No big deal, except that "binged" is also the past tense of binge, which means to eat or imbibe to unhealthy excess, in the formal eating disorder sense of the word. Of course, these sound different when spoken, but on paper, they're the same. Another potential past-tense of "bing" could be bung, and let's not even go there.
Sixth: the present participle of "bing" is "binging". The dual repetition of the -ing is not conducive to the use of this word in casual conversation! It's naselly and too hard to enunciate. Normally a person could just drop the terminal G but that leads to:
The other day I was BINGIN' some stuff about World of Warcraft and I found a great page showing me how to PWN those n00bs
Please see item #2 above. In general, the omnipresent/double "ing" in "Bing" causes all sorts of issues with casual speech, because it either requires extra effort to enunciate distinctly, or it gets dropped, or it ends up sandwiched uncomfortably against the next word.
Seventh: I don't mind calling myself a Googler but I will NOT tolerate being called a Binger. Nowadays people will cheerfully call themselves Googlers and Gayglers and Googlephiles and when they do, they're not necessarily swearing allegiance to a product. They're swearing allegiance to a culture and a lifestyle and a way of looking at and interpreting the world. Both Google and Microsoft are out to make a profit—let's not kid ourselves—but Google will always be the give-it-away-for-free company and Microsoft will always be the charge-you-an-arm-and-a-leg company. 100 million dollars of advertising doesn't change that.
Finally: the name Bing has no substance. It lacks authenticity. It was fabricated by marketing gurus and choosers of names. Engineered. It lacks the good-natured-yet-world-changing charm of a name like Google, and it lacks the Google story. Whimsically creative agnostic names (names that don't really "mean" anything and are thus seen as a blank slate, ripe for branding) are all the rage these days, but the very best names (Twitter, Google, etc.) are lifted from the mind-mesh of whatever domain the site is focused on. Twitter is a verb which means "to make high pitched sounds, as of birds". Google (or rather, googol) is a well-known number and suggests vast quantities of data. But Bing...Bing means precisely nothing, and it doesn't have even a tangential relationship to search.
(Ah, except for the sound of found and other cocktail party slogans. But the whole "ringing bell of search" thing is a little corny, and anyway, everybody knows that bells DING and DONG, not BING and BONG.)
So in conclusion I can only say to Microsoft: I'm sorry, but Steven Hodsen is right.
The fact is that Microsoft could have finally developed the killer search engine that leaves Google and all the rest in the dust but it won’t matter one bit with a name like Bing.
Bing is a good name—for a can of soda, a children's cartoon, a puzzle game, or maybe even some sort of revolutionary Web 3.0 social networking site. Bing might even succeed as a search engine, on the merits. I hope it does: I think Google could use the competition. But as a household verb, not only will Bing not succeed...it won't even have a chance to fail.
On the brighter side, at least it's not WolframAlpha...
Posted by James Devlin 34 comment(s)
