Ginormity

A few weeks ago, a friend wrote a summary of his business trip and used the word "ginormous". I suppose, to the uninitiated, the word looks like "gih-normous" since it starts with a "g" and people like to pronounce that with a hard "g" sound, rather than "jy-normous", which suggests the real roots of this made-up word, "gigantic" and "enormous".

Americans are fond of creating new words all the time. Slang phrases become part of normal vocabulary, such that "diss" which comes from "disrespect" (is that even a word) becomes part of day-to-day language. I'd have to give credit to inventive phrase (and music and dance, etc) to African Americans. The rest of the U.S. picks it up well after it's been first coined.

I had thought "ginormous" was just a clever phrase, made up just for the occasion, but now I'm seeing it everywhere. Did ginormous just take a leap in popularity? And when did it do this? I looked at Google Trends to see if searches involve "ginormous", but apparently, while it's common to use the word, few search for it.

It's just the kind of word you think is pretty old (maybe like "fantabulous") this mashup of two or more words, and yet I've only noticed it recently, which typically means it's been in limited use for some time before that. For example, when did goatees come back in style? Last five years? Last ten? Probably have to go back to 15 years ago, and yet it looks so modern and recent, even though it isn't (admittedly, it was a look that came back in vogue after it had been popular in the counterculture movement of the sixties, then faded into obscurity through much of the 70s and 80s before surfacing again in the 90s).

Speaking of searches, there was a snafu at AOL when anonymized searches were put up on the net for the purposes of research. Apparently, it never occurred to AOL that maybe these queries, despite being anonymized would provide enough clues to the person making the queries. Thus, age, location, ethnicity, even anger to recent breakups find themselves in queries.

This put egg in AOL's face, a company already suffering from its heavy handed tactics of preventing customers from easily leaving AOL for greener pastures.

But the original intent, using queries for research, is still possible, and despite the revealing nature of the kinds of queries people make (showing either anger or kinkiness), there is something more interesting. That's the query itself.

When I use Google to make queries, my queries are keywords. For example, I might say "Ruby Rails Tutorial". But many of the queries treat searches like oracles, such as "Find me a good tutorial on ruby on rails". I would imagine such queries are harder for search engines to work with since there are so many extraneous words that are just so much noise. Of course, the folks who know about this first hand are the search engine folks. After all, they're the ones that have to process these queries.

I wonder, though, if there will come a time when we'll head back to something that Yahoo once tried to be: a directory for the masses. The problem with Yahoo's approach is that the list of links they provided were simply that, a list. There was no way to rank the links so that more relevant ones went up, and less relevant ones went down.

I can imagine, for example, a list of common things, say, databases, or tutorials on Ruby on Rails (or Django or Erlang + Yaws) where people post links to tutorials, and then users vote them up or down. The key is how stale the rankings are. The idea is to find someway to determine relevance based on people who know. Right now, Google uses its page rank system to determine relevance based on links by important websites. This has worked really well for Google (think of how many spam you get as results--hardly any).

Anyway, it's a ginormous world out there. Because you know, neither gigantic, nor enormous, by themselves, convey the sheer size that ginormous does and it's creative to boot.