Do You Yahoo?

Sorry, can't say that I do. I mean yeah, I have a Yahoo mail account and I play fantasy sports on Yahoo, I even occasionally fire up a game or two from Yahoo's extensive collection of ways to waste time. But no, I don't Yahoo.

There are some things that I do, quite a few when I stop and think about it actually. You probably do at least a couple of them as well. I never feel alone when I Google something or somebody. No one has ever misunderstood me when I told them I needed to Xerox a couple of pages. When my girlfriend and I hear about a movie we want to see, we Netflix it. My friends who still watch television Tivo almost everything important, after all ads are so passe these days. If something or someone is getting Hoovered its probably a dirty joke, but I doubt that an explanation would be required. If you need it over night or just across the country I'll Fed-ex it too you, but the odds are good that the postman will be bringing it. Want to change one of your photos, hide the evidence or maybe just plant some, easy I'll Photoshop it for you.

Why is it that some nouns, and not just any old nouns but trademarked ones, get verbed and others don't? Even more interestingly why do concerted efforts to verb trademarks fail? Recently, and by that I mean sometime in maybe the last five years, Yahoo pushed really hard to verb themselves and came up empty. Do you even remember when you got asked if you Yahoo'd? I suppose that this phenomena is organic and viral and inherently resistant to being told what to do, the internet is after all, about freedom.

My friends and family happily pass Kleenex to me, and I bet you would too. Most of us owned a Discman somewhere along the way, my first one was an Aiwa though. Words enter our lexicon from all sorts of places and angles and many people have written more extensively and eloquently on the subject than I will pretend to. If you don't believe me just google it.