Published on this site, May 27, 2007

 

Searching for Googlenopes
by
Pierre Lemieux

 

In Saturday’s National Post, Gene Weingarten claims that “[i]t’s pretty hard to find a phrase or expression that is not out there somewhere on the Web.” He calls these “Googlenopes”. Inspired by the challenge, I tried to find Googlenopes, and found it very easy. The first sentence I gave Google was nowhere to be found: “minister defending Canadian liberty”. Variations of the sentence brought no match. Nobody has ever written “federal government protecting the liberty of Canadians” or “federal government protects our traditional liberties”. After a several such failures, and not a single hit, I was a little bit surprised, however, not to find standard Orwellian Newspeak. I typed in, “Harper is a doubleplusgood duckspeaker”, and Google found no match.