It’s hard to convince Google you’re not dead

According to Google, Tom Faber is dead. A real shock for the English freelancer, whose appetite is still big. Stunned, Faber sent Google a message, only to explain his status as a living being, and to say that he was not the same Tom Faber as a namesake of the physicist whose face was now his, according to Google.

Alphabet, the parent company, twiddled its thumbs, despite the journalist’s pleas. The core was the algorithm. Deep in the data, the search giant had merged the two Tom Fabers into one dead entity. A simple solution, no doubt. Yet asking Google to undo the malfunction became a saga that the (breathing) Faber recorded in the Guardian.

Faber delves into search-squatting, where the “spammie fringes” attempt to redirect searches to customer domains, separate from the paid links that legitimate companies embed to boost their own traffic. This is where I raised my eyebrows. A new area of ​​human behavior usually signals new language, and Faber’s post didn’t disappoint:

“This is what is known as ‘black hat’ SEO (Search Engine Optimization), with malicious actors using techniques with malicious names such as ‘reputation abuse’, ‘obituary spam’, ‘keyword swarming’ or ‘parasite hosting’ to get their content to the top of Google search results and make a quick buck.”

I live for that stuff. Not the malpractice, but the dialect. Just as warnings of Trumpflation should the Republican Party come to power make my heart beat faster to imagine our language—instead of export tariffs—expanding. It’s unfortunate, I know. I’m not looking for something so much as some neologism-squat.

Take tanghulu, for example. This Chinese toffee apple went viral in May when a million TikTok teens burned their mouths on volcanic syrup while trying to make the novelty at home. Doctors warned. So did the media. Yet all I saw was the welcome rarity of an eight-letter dessert ending in U.

Constant begging won’t get you substance for a neologism – or an English freelancer.

In consolation, Andrew Fisher sent an email. Not the Australian Prime Minister – he’s dead – but one of Australia’s best Scrabble players and a former champion on SBS’s Letters and numbers. Here is a selection of the new Collins Scrabble words, valid for play worldwide (except America) from January 2025. In Andrew’s words, the 1814 additions were “very, very noisy” – including noisy.

The intake was dizzying, from ACK (expression of mild alarm) to ZHUSH (cheer up), with countless acronyms (BOPO – body positivity) and fusions (BACNE – pimples on the back) in between. Gen-Z slang dominated, including BOUJEE, TOMOZ and LEWK, each a new chance to play some clumsy tiles.