Ryan MacMillan

For the latest entry into the Department of Neologisms, I have decided to buck the trend - nay, the universal lockstep - of referring to the conjugation of Google and Yahoo! as ‘Yahoogle’. From now on, this blog (well, possibly only me) will speak only of Googahoo! There are many reasons behind this:

1) Googahoo!, unlike Yahoogle, can easily be substituted for the meaningless ‘goo-goo-ga-joob’ bit in ‘I am the Walrus’, thereby making what would otherwise be an unspeakably dull story about anti-trust, into something that, everytime you play it, probably contributes to Heather Mills’ slush fund.

2) The exclamation mark in ‘Yahoo!’ has, of late, suggested a more than faint sense of despair, rather than the spunky mid-1990s elan it once thought to evoke. To speak the exclamation in Yahoo! is to summon sad childhood memories of deflated balloons, the non-existence of Santa, etc. However, when used in Googahoo!, said punctuation mark allows the speaker to startle their friends by jumping out from behind a search engine and screaming “Googahoo!” at the top of their voice, which is much more fun.

3) Because this is the Dept. of Neologisms, we can basically do what we like, and thus the ! in Googahoo! is interchangeable with any other bit of punctuation, thereby rendering it useable on a number of platforms (kind of an open-API word, if you will, and i know you won’t), viz: “Googahoo?” allows the user to ask a question in the voice of Scooby Doo, whilst simultaneously signaling their up-to-date knowledge of the latest in commercial search. “Googahoo&” permits the user to turn the interweb partnership of the moment into a classic 1960s sitcom, a la Googahoo& Son, or into a 1980s soft-rock duo, Googahoo& Cry. Googahoo* is perhaps the most useful as it allows the user to make innumerable footnoted disclaimers, like “Googahoo*…. *please note, this is not guaranteed to increase share prices in any company associated with Jerry Yang”

4) Googahoo! is, in many ways, the sequel to Yahoo!, thus clearly making it Googahoo 2: Electric Boogaloo.

So, think on, no more Yahoogle!, it’s all Googahoo! from now on…