By David Astle
According to Google, Tom Faber is dead. A genuine shock for the English freelancer, whose appetite remains hearty. Baffled, Faber dropped Google a line, just to explain his living status, reporting he wasn’t the same Tom Faber as a namesake physicist whose face was now his, according to Google.
Alphabet, the mother company, twiddled her thumbs, despite the journo’s requests. The gist was the algorithm. Deep in the data, the search giant had conflated the two Tom Fabers into one deceased whole. A simple fix, surely. Yet asking Google to undo the glitch became a saga the (breathing) Faber recorded in the Guardian.
Asking Google to undo the glitch became a saga.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Faber delves into search-squatting, where the “spammier fringes” seek to divert searches to clients’ domains, separate from the paid links that legit firms embed to boost their own traffic. Here my eyebrows raised. A new realm of human behaviour typically signals new language, and nor did Faber’s feature disappoint:
“This is what’s known as “black hat” SEO [Search Engine Optimisation], bad actors who use techniques with evil names such as “reputation abuse”, “obituary spam”, “keyword swarming” or “parasite hosting” to bring their content to the top of Google’s search results and turn a quick buck.”
I live for that stuff. Not the malpractice, but the dialect. Just as warnings of Trumpflation, should the Republican Party gain office, set my pulse racing to imagine our language – rather than export tariffs – increasing. It’s deplorable, I know. I don’t search-squat so much as neologism-squat.
Take tanghulu, say. This Chinese toffee apple went viral in May owing to a million TikTok teens burning their mouths on the volcanic syrup, trying to make the novelty at home. Doctors issued warnings. Media too. Yet all I could see was the welcome rarity of an eight-letter dessert ending in U.
Constant pleading can’t make a neologism – or an English freelancer – take on substance.
By way of comfort, Andrew Fisher sent an email. Not the Australian PM – he’s dead – but one of Australia’s finest Scrabble players, and former champ on SBS’s Letters and Numbers. Attached was a smatter of new Collins Scrabble Words, valid for play all over the world (except America) from January, 2025. In Andrew’s words, the 1814 additions were “very noice indeed” – NOICE included.
The intake was dizzying, from ACK (expression of mild alarm) to ZHUSH (to jazz up), with untold acronyms (BOPO – body positivity) and fusions (BACNE – pimples on the back) in between. Gen-Z slang dominated, including BOUJEE, TOMOZ and LEWK, each one a fresh chance to play some clunky tiles.
Brett Smitheram, the UK Scrabble maestro, was thrilled to see SEALION sealing into one word (“finally ANISOLE has its anagram!“). Andrew was equally jubilant about the all-tile potential of ALTCOIN, or the handy vowel-dumps of OWO and UWU (text-speak for surprise and admiration respectively). Though Fisher remains stumped by the exile of PIDE, INARI and GOZLEME: “You can eat them, just not play them.”
Australia has helped to add RONA, FLOATIES and CRUEL (as a verb). Which brings us back to Tom Faber, the journo cruelled by Google until his life was officially reinstated in July. Tom’s farce shows how people are like new words, free-floating entities believing they exist. But the truth is messier than that. Constant pleading can’t make a neologism – or an English freelancer – take on substance. History suggests you need the meme, the headlines, the tech article, the microwave mishaps, the CNN pundits, the Scrabble bible, the language column, to ratify your existence.
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