New slang?

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>I once suggested to a group of white people that "googob" might have
>affected the development of "googol." After being tarred and feathered
>and ridden out of town on a rail, I've since been somewhat circumspect
>WRT publicly proposing that theory.
>
>Note that the above is offered merely an anecdote and is not a
>suggestion, let alone an assertion, that there may be an etymological
>connection between "googob" and "googol."

No reason there shouldn't be a connection IMHO. There's "gobs of this",
there's "oodles of that", there's "a big boodle" of something else. It is
generally believed that "googol" was the invention of a 9-year-old boy:
maybe he'd heard something like "google" or maybe it was his own
'expressive coinage' which coincidentally parallelled somebody else's
"googob" ... hard to say.

-- Doug Wilson