Language games
I noticed something interesting this morning when reading BoingBoing from my RSS aggregator. In a report about the jetBlue fiasco last week, Cory Doctorow writes,
After a week of terrible JetBlue delays, the CEO put together a youtube in which he apologizes to JetBlue fliers and promises to institute major changes to prevent a recurrence.What's interesting about this posting is not that the CEO used YouTube to distribute his apology (well, that's sort of interesting, but not what I'm talking about here), it's that Doctorow has now coined a neologism: "youtube," as in, "post/distribute a video via YouTube." It's fascinating to witness the language changes that the internet brings with it - "googling" is now used as a reference to any type of online search - and now it looks like "youtube" will represent any sort of online video content. The commercial nature of the web is now becoming naturalized into the language we use to talk about it. This has happened before with terms like "Xerox" and "aspirin," but I wonder if terms like "googling" or "youtub(ing)" will have the same staying power. Oh, and it's a bit unnerving to realize that with Google's acquisition of YouTube, they're actually "owners" of both neologisms.