Take the prosaic Search Engine, of which Google is the ascendant example. So popular is Google, in fact, that it has become genericized in verb form: To “google” something means to use an Internet search engine in order to find instances of it on the World Wide Web.
In so doing, you can discover the damndest things.
F’rinstance: Students who merrily plagiarize other people’s work can now get a Rude Surprise when their teachers or professors use search engines to match strings of words in research papers to their original source materials. Can you say “flunk”?
There’s more. Several years ago, on a trip to Japan with Elder Daughter, we espied a young lady wearing a sweatshirt with a bizarre legend. Lookee:
“Cause The Crowd All Love Pulling Dolly By The Hair.” WTF is that supposed to mean!??!
At the time, I attributed the bizarre words to the peculiar Japanese propensity for decorating their clothing with random English words. Sometimes the results are hilarious to English speakers, but, like Chinese character tattoos here, the desired effect is primarily decoration, not the transmission of meaning.
That’s what I thought at the time, anyway.
For reasons that I still cannot fathom, I recently took it upon myself to do a Google search - that is, I googled - the phrase “cause the crowd all love pulling dolly by the hair.” And, whaddaya know - they’re not just random words strung together for bizarre effect.
They’re song lyrics!
Specifically, they’re lyrics from the Duran Duran song “Girls On Film”:
The diving man’s coming up for air
’Cause the crowd all love
Pulling dolly by the hair, by the hair
So: Now I know where those strange words came from. They were not random after all. Perhaps I would have known this if, at any time, I had ever given a rat’s ass about Duran Duran or their popular-for-a-while-in-the-1980’s music. Thanks, Google!
This does not make the young lady’s sweatshirt any less bizarre, mind you. It does, however, make it somewhat more understandable.
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