New slang?

[Wilson Gray]

On 10/25/05, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
> Subject:      Re: New slang?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >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
>

That's a good point, Doug. What really happened - naturally, I wasn't
even tarred, let alone feathered, etc. - is that I made the
unwarranted assumption that  "googol," which I hadn't and to this day
still haven't heard spoken, was pronounced "goo GOL." "Googob" is
prounounced "goo GOB." GooGOL and gooGOB, q.e.d. Of course, this
argument is somewhat vitiated, if "googol" has the same pronunciation
as, e,g, "Google." But, at the time, my auditors merely said, "That's
bullshit!" and didn't bother to construct a couunter-argument. So,
until Google came on line and it occurred to me that that name was
probably a pun on "googol," I continued to hold to my belief that
there was a necessary connection between these two words and not a
merely accidental one.
--
-Wilson Gray