Usually the emails from the U-M Dean of Students pass quickly through my email inbox with little to note. But as I skimmed one the other day, just before hitting the ‘delete’ button, a phrase caught my attention:
We are happy to share with you the reports we have had of great [U-M football] fan behavior so far this season, unmarred by rude behavior, offensive language or the tossing of objects.
“The tossing of objects?” Curious to know what kind of past excitements might have elicited the mention in the Dean’s email, I did some research on object tossing at UofM football games. I discovered that the University Board of Regents actually has an ordinance (backed by a fine up to $50 and a misdemeanor charge) prohibiting spectators at University sporting events from throwing stuff. A story about a recent challenge to this ordinance - the tossing of one particular kind of object by senior engineer Jay Trzkinski, aka “Hot Dog Man” - led me to another interesting phrase:
The issue at the tightly packed Big House isn’t as much about a hot dog inflicting pain as it is keeping students from knocking people over, [Athletic Dept facilities manager Rob] Rademacher said.
A hot dog inflicting pain. When I forwarded the Michigan Daily article to Tim, he immediately responded the same way I did. Somewhat miraculously, we both independently performed Google searches for the exact phrase “hot dog inflicting pain.”
Which brings us to the real point of this post. All of this hot-dog-tossing nonsense is just a lead-in to what we both discovered by searching for that phrase: that in Google’s index of billions of websites - which Tim the Linguist reminds me represents a vast corpus of written English - the exact phrase “hot dog inflicting pain” appears once and only once. (That is, until the Google spiders find this website.) In this, we discovered another thing to collect on this blog.
We call it a Googalone. (No Google, I did not mean google.) A phrase that yields only one site match in a Google search.
We’d like to encourage you to help us find Googalones (No Google, I did not mean goggles.) The rules of our scavenger hunt:
1. Googalones must be submitted by email (not as a comment) to protect their innocence until officially recognized here.
2. They can’t be random spam, they must have a discernible author (for us to, um, credit.) I like them better if they have a complete noun phrase and verb phrase.
3. You can’t make your own page with a fake one just to impress us. That’s stupid.
4. Please email submissions to googalones at [name of this blog] dot com.
Stop tossing objects and get searching!
3 responses so far ↓
1 Scott T. // Nov 2, 2007 at 5:30 pm
This is similar to the idea of a Google Whack: http://www.googlewhack.com/ except google whack’s must be two words.
2 timothy // Nov 2, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Nice, I never heard of a Google Whack, though I knew there must be other people out there doing this kind of thing. One important difference though, is that we’re looking for unique strings of adjacent words, things that you’d query in quotes.
Think of Chomsky’s ” “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously), a sentence which when he wrote it he assumed had never before occurred in English discourse.
Linguists like to jump off from there to marvel at the capacity of children to produce totally novel utterances that they’ve never heard before by using grammar. From there it gets more complicated…
Anyway, the basic idea is that if you find a sweet phrase like “hot dog inflicting pain” while you’re reading something, you should Google that exact phrase, and if the page you read it on is the only result, send it our way. Then we can give the author - in this case the illustrious Dave Mekelburg - the proud distinction of having brought something unique into the online world.
We encourage everyone to follow the links to each phrase’s search and click on the result, so if the authors check their website’s referrer logs, they’ll see a mysterious amount of traffic coming in by searches for their random phrase.
3 Murph // Dec 4, 2007 at 11:06 am
Try also “googlenope“, a phrase that has zero hits on google until you’ve posted about it’s having zero hits on google.
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