Just fucking Bing it

Microsoft launched a new search engine this week named Bing. The name seems odd, but, Microsoft being Microsoft, there are a lot of marketing reasons why it is so – the most interesting for a lexicographer being the (possibly optimistic) hope that it will start to get used as a verb:

If Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”

This verbification is an unusual thing for a company to want to one of its trademarks, for reasons explained by the Chambers Editors’ blog:

Becoming the generic term for a class of product is certainly confirmation of a brand’s dominance. However, if a trademark becomes genericized, the owners’ intellectual property rights to the word are threatened. Syntactic or morphological shifts such as verbification and pluralization can often signal a trademark’s demise and so are actively discouraged by the likes of Google™, Hoover™ and Xerox™ wishing to avoid the fate of escalator, kerosene, trampoline and yo-yo.

Google made the jump from noun to verb years ago: the verb is first attested in the OED with a quotation from a Usenet post from October 1999, made just over a year after the search engine itself launched. It remains to be seen if the verb Bing catches on in the same way, not least because Binged resembles a common spelling of the past tense of the verb binge – which might have what Steve Ballmer calls negative, unusual connotations.