I was looking at the Google letters on my laptop screen yesterday and wondering how did those guys (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) come up with such a delightful name.
I was thinking about how it caught on when it could have been a disaster. I mean, Google? So I googled to find out. Apparently someone misspelled “googol,” which is “ten raised to the power of one-hundred.” Such mathematics are beyond my ken! And as a lit. major I just keep seeing Gogol! But the name Google rings another bell in my memory.
My father, who died way back in 1965 (way too soon, when phones were still attached to walls and didn’t even have area codes) didn’t sing much (he was notoriously off-key), but one of the songs he used to sing to me was a 1920s pop tune called “Barney Google.” “Barney Google with the goo-goo-googily eyes! Barney Google has a wife three times his size!” That’s all I remember, but that’s what Google would mean to my pre-tech Papa.
As for any correlation between Google and Barney? Well, I certainly get googily eyes from searching the web too much! And if I sit here hunched over this laptop for hours on end I will soon weigh three times what I do now! Time to get out and kick the soccer ball! (Yes, soccer. But I’ll save that for another post.)
No comments yet.