Generic Verb Vs. Brand Verb

It’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! Every first Wednesday of the month we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to come up with solutions.


The IWSG question of the month is "What's the strangest thing you've ever googled in researching a story?" Before I answer that question, I'm going to make a change in the wording of it but the meaning will be essentially the same. So, to rephrase the question: What's the strangest thing you've ever discovered in researching a story on the Internet?

The reason I rephrased the question was because I try not use brand names for verbs like I try not to use them as nouns to refer to a general product. For example, Google is a brand of a search engine, it is not all search engines or just any search engine. This proper noun of a brand name has been casually used as a verb that means to do an internet search. It's similar to using the brand name Coke to refer to all colas or even soda in general.

Google may allow for the casual use of its company name as a verb, and so not bother suing anyone using it in their writing. However, to be more grammatically correct, it is, in my opinion, better to use the generic verb to refer to an action rather than use one derived from a company or product name. It's better to say "searched the Internet" rather than "googled". When you do that, you are relying more on universal and public language rather than on a company's trademarked vocabulary to get your ideas across. It's a kind of creator or writer independence. I'm not trying to judge anyone's writing or vocabulary, I'm just saying what I feel is more liberating as well as grammatically correct language.

Now, finally, to answer the question, what's the strangest thing you've ever discovered in researching a story on the Internet? To tell you the truth, I do so much research on Internet for both my fiction and non-fiction and so have seen so many strange things on it that I cannot say what the strangest has been. I can say that the most unusual thing I've researched on the internet is the decay process of a human corpse. I needed to find out the process for a horror story I was writing one time in order to make the decaying of a victim's corpse over a certain time span believable.

Similarly, for another horror story, I had to research the Internet to find out what the odor of a burnt human corpse was likened to. I never knew this before, but I found out that the odor smells like rotting pork. It's a good thing I don't believe in eating swine meat!

Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts: Sadira Stone, Patricia Josephine, Lisa Buie-Collard, Erika Beebe, and C. Lee McKenzie! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels!

Until next time . . .