Competing forms: swiffed vs swiffered (was: tased vs tasered)

[Clai Rice]

If you enter the search term in quotation marks then Google won't return the
associated forms.
Searching on "tased" vs. tased returns roughly the same number of ghits
(320,000 vs. 318,000), but the former returns only hits on the exact word
_tased_.

The TASER company legal page tells us that TASER is an acronym for "Thomas
A. Swift's Electric Rifle," and that one should "always use a TASER
trademark as an adjective, not a noun or verb."

Incorrect: "The officer shot his taser" or "I'm going to TASER you."

Correct: "The officer shot his TASER device" or "I'm going to stop you with
a TASER device."
http://www.taser.com/legal/Pages/trademarks.aspx

Melanie Lynne Hauser has written 2 novels now about a supermom who has an
accident with a swiffer that releases her superpowers. On her website you
can read the first chapter of the first novel, which includes this
interesting passage:

I made quick work of the kitchen, taking full advantage of my ability to
clean with the power of 10,000 Swiffers, which was by far the most practical
of the superpowers I had acquired since suffering my Horrible Swiffer
Accident last fall.  (***Swiffer, by the way, is a remarkable cleaning
product that I heartily endorse.  And which was not responsible for my
Horrible Swiffer Accident, as I had violated the warranty by negligently
pouring dangerous combinations of household cleaners in the reservoir and
inhaling their fumes due to improper ventilation.)

***Just a little legal mumbo-jumbo that Proctor and Gamble "suggested" I use
from now on.
http://www.melanielynnehauser.com/SMSTWChapOne.html

Unfortunately we cannot search inside the books at Amazon, but I'm pretty
sure we won't find any analyzed forms of Swiffer in there. These companies
assiduously patrol the media for copyright violations and the larger print
outlets have received plenty of warning notices.

The analyzed forms will show up mostly in unpatrollable usage, such as
everyday speech and genres that relay on everyday speech such as police
reports or legal testimony.

--Clai Rice

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Damien Hall [mailto:halldj at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU]
> Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2007 11:15 AM
> Subject: Competing forms: swiffed vs swiffered (was: tased vs tasered)
>
> Clai's message about *tased* vs *tasered* reminded me of a
> Texan friend's surprise at the form *swiffered* in 2002, when
> I believe that the Swiffer (a
> floor-mop) was new on the market.
>
> Raw Google hits (3 Nov 07) for all four forms are approximately:
>
> TASED      302,000
> TASERED    1,050,000
> SWIFFED    425
> SWIFFERED  551
>
> For both roots, then, the unanalysed form seems to be more
> popular than the analysed form.  There are, of course, the
> usual caveats about using Google data, and there's another
> one which is new to me at least.  Google seems to have
> developed some parsing and analytical capacity:
>
> - on the first page of *tased* hits (I have only looked at
> the first ten in each
> case) the bolded words, indicating the ones picked up by the
> search algorithm, include *tasers* and *tase* as well as the
> *tased* I searched for;
> - the first page of *tasered* results also includes hits on *taser*.
>
> The first pages of results for *swiffered* and *swiffed*
> include nothing but the terms actually input into the
> algorithm, though.  Could it be that for (even
> fleetingly) common morphologically-complex words, someone has
> told Google how to analyse them?
>
> I'm not sure that there's a broader conclusion to be drawn
> from this, given the usual caveats on Googling and the fact
> that I didn't (explicitly) search for other possible
> derivations from these words, like *tas(er)ing*, *swiff* /
> *tase* and so on.  Also, the raw numbers of hits for
> *swiffed* and *swiffered* are rather low.  But it is
> interesting that they do at least have the same trend as the
> derivations from *taser*:  maybe people prefer not to analyse
> new lexical items morphologically, even when the analysis
> would be transparent?
> Perhaps a reason for this preference would be that tracing
> the analysed form
> *swiff* / *tase* back to its root would be more difficult
> than going in the opposite direction and could lead to
> misunderstandings?  Of course, this flies in the face of the
> current popularity and comprehensibility of *Don't tase me,
> bro!*, but it will be interesting to see which form catches
> on in the long term.
>
> Just some thoughts.
>
> Damien Hall
> University of Pennsylvania
>

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