August 28, 2009

googlewhacks, Orwell, & modest immodesty

A googlewhack is a two-word phrase, which, when entered as a google query, yields a unique result. It turns out that a three-word phrase in our public service announcement posted yesterday, namely "inane marketing falsehoods", does not appear, as of this writing, per google, to be anywhere else on the web. 

Here, try it yourself:

George Orwell, in his great 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language", lamented that "modern writing at its worst ... consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else..." So, what appears to be our accidental invention of a novel three-word phrase may suggest that we are at least avoiding the worst.

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