One-hit wonder

Are you proud of your vocabulary? Can you read William F. Buckley without retreating to the Oxford English Dictionary? Do you get a kick out of impressing friends by dropping into casual conversation the kind of word -- obmutescence comes to mind -- that makes normal people think their right eyeball is in their left socket?

If so, then you've probably lost most of your friends, but take heart.

You've got a great future.

You can be a Googlewhacker.

Don't bother to look it up. You won't find it in the dictionary, not even among the 500,000 words in the 20-volume OED. Named after the Internet search engine, Googlewhacking is a neologism that refers to a game growing in popularity around the world among people with entirely too much time on their hands. The goal is simple: to log on to Google and to come up with two words that return a single hit. Once Google scans its 8 billion pages, usually in less than a second, check the finding in the upper right corner of the screen. If it says, ''Results 1-1 of 1," then congratulations!

You're a Googlewhacker.

Be warned, though. This is not as easy as it sounds.

Of 200 million queries to Google every day, no one knows how many are searches for Googlewhacks, but one site devoted to Googlewhacking includes a page that features an honor roll of sorts, the Whack Stack, a list of the most recent 2,000 whacks, and any one of them would give a sane person lexicological apoplexy.

What kind of mind, after all, pairs words like ''kangaroos astronavigation"? Or ''cuttlefish necrophile"? Or ''cornflour troglodyte"?

Googlewhackers sometimes rely on science to come up with such whacks as ''naughty micropaleontologist" or on food to produce ''unicycle beansprout." Others employ idioms, as in ''evisceration brewskies," or ''cromulent mcjobs."

The more arcane the words, of course, the more likely the phrase is a Googlewhack, as in ''humuhumunukunukuapuaa prejudiced." That's not a word heard on the Red Line every morning, to be sure, but if you had studied at all in school, you'd recognize humuhumunukunukuapuaa as a reference to either of two triggerfishes, Rhinecanthus aculeatus or R. rectangulus, both native to the outer reefs of Hawaii.

Although Googlewhackers are largely anonymous, Joy Begbie, 32, of Somerville has risen to Whack Stack prominence for dozens of Googlewhacks, ''knackwurst gaming" among the more imaginative.

Between the time a message was left on her telephone with an invitation to talk about Googlewhacks and the time she returned the call, Begbie came up with a half dozen more, including ''humidies gangbusters," ''reticulate gamine," and ''phlegnomous gaming."

''You know," she says, modestly accepting congratulations, ''sometimes you get obsessed with something for a while and do it all the time, and then you don't do it for a month until you say, you know what? I haven't found a Googlewhack in a while, and so I'm going to try to figure some out. But I'm interested in words, and the thing about Googlewhacking is that it expands your mind as far as words are concerned. It makes you think: What is the adjectival form of this? What is the plural of that?"

Crazy as it sounds, Googlewhacking may be good for your mental health.

''It's excellent exercise for many brain centers," says Allen D. Bragdon, founding editor of Games magazine and author of a number of books on enhancing brain function, including ''Exercises for the Whole Brain."

''It requires a high order of a cognitive skill called 'theory of mind,' " he says. ''That is the ability to imagine what another person is thinking. . . . A whacker has to project his or her understanding of the rules of human behavior into the minds of Google programmers and into the minds of other Internet search practitioners. The words become iconographic symbols of other people's non-interest, how they don't think. So, it's more a psychological diagnostic exercise than a language puzzle."

A graduate of Rhode Island College with a degree in theater, Begbie is employed as a monitor of customer service calls, and her goal this year is to read 50 books, five of which have been completed. ''All that reading," she says, ''may help with the whacking."

One of the Googlewhacks she produced seemed directed toward her interviewer.

''Didjeridoos blockheads," she said.

Beg pardon?

''Didjeridoos blockheads," she repeated, impatiently, emphasizing ''didjeridoos," which refers to a musical instrument of the Aboriginal people of Australia that consists of a long hollow stick that makes a deep drone when blown. ''Do you know what I'm talking about?"

Googlewhacking maniaIn two years, Googlewhacking has grown from a diversion for bored geeks into a best-selling book in Britain, ''Dave Gorman's Googlewhack! Adventure," and a one-person play of the same title, starring the comedian Gorman, who's performed the part in Australia, Europe, and off-Broadway. A DVD was released in November, and the play is scheduled for performances across the United States this year, including a three-week run in Los Angeles in the spring.

In a review as manic as Gorman's book, The New York Times lauded his one-man show for having the precision of Mussolini's trains and the oddball intensity of early routines by Steve Martin.

A good vocabulary is a help in climbing the corporate ladder, says Tim Fitzgerald, director of the Boston office of the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation, which develops aptitude tests.

''We did two studies," says Fitzgerald, himself a Googlewhacker. ''We measured the vocabulary of business executives and found that CEOs had the highest vocabulary level of any occupational group we measured. A CEO's role involves communication all day to different facets of a company, and so you might have someone from the technical side who's got a great specialized vocabulary about engineering, but never needs to talk to marketing.

''In the other study, we went to different companies and tested everybody to compare vocabulary levels from the lowest tier to the highest, and found that the higher you ranked in the company, the better your vocabulary was likely to be. The conclusion was that the lack of a good vocabulary can prevent you from reaching full potential. Even if you have wonderful abilities, no one will know if you can't communicate effectively."

But phrases like ''naughty micropaleontologist" and ''humuhumunukunukuapuaa" may also get you reassigned to the shipping department.

''A game like Googlewhacking can be helpful in that you might expose yourself to words that you wouldn't encounter otherwise," says Fitzgerald. ''On the other hand, you might also simply be exposing yourself to very bizarre words that you really have no reason to use in any other context. It's the same with crosswords puzzles, in which you are exposed to a whole set of words that you really see only in crosswords puzzles."

The art of the searchGooglewhacking imposes few rules: no proper nouns, no words from website word lists, and each word must be found at dictionary.com, which can be clicked from the Google page.

So, Begbie is asked, in light of all the diversions available in the electronic age, what's the big thrill in Googlewhacking?

''There's something oddly satisfying about it. I can't explain why, but it's like anything you search for. If you play hide and seek, and you find something, then you're excited. If you lose something in your house, like your car keys, and eventually you find them, it's cool. The end of a search is the best part."

The elation at discovery of a Googlewhack is brief, for registering the phrase on the Googlewhack site means, by definition, that it appears on two webpages and, therefore, is no longer a Googlewhack.

Asked when she Googlewhacks, she pauses.

''If I say 'at work,' I'll get in trouble," she says. ''But it's something you do when bored. For me, I'll be googling something unrelated and I'll say to myself, 'Hmmmm. This is an interesting word. I wonder if I can find a whack with that.' "

What is the secret of success?

''Well, some people use obscure biological terms or mathematical terms or other words you don't really hear in normal conversation," says Begbie, ''but I try not to do that. I try to use words I know. It's my own little, self-imposed restriction.

''But you need a good vocabulary, and then you have to be able to think outside the box and not get stuck on just one word. You might start with 'blockhead,' then go to 'blackhead' and then to 'blathering.' If you find a word you think is unusual, put it into the Google and see how many times it comes up just by itself, and then think of something else that's completely unrelated."

Bragdon agrees.

'' 'Divergent Thinking' is the neuro-name for thinking outside the box. A good Googlewhacker has to imagine the shapes of all those other surfer's boxes," Bragdon says. ''Divergent thinking uses more global perception, or right hemisphere, than language processing, which is left hemisphere. But it requires the left hemisphere's prefrontal skills to imagine how other people categorize. Remembering is vastly aided by categorizing unrelated data.

''I'd like to think Googlewhacking will become more popular than computer games," he says, ''because it exercises many more cognitive toolboxes than the eye-hand coordination of games."

Challenged to find a Googlewhack with the word ''boysenberry," Begbie takes no more than an hour.

''I have recently been reading a book about apes," she says, ''and it turns out that apparently orangutans don't eat boysenberries, and so, those two words make a whack, as do 'boysenberry silverback,' 'boysenberries legislating,' 'boysenberry stalactite' and 'boysenberries stolid.'

''I think I may have gone a little overboard there," she confesses, ''but as I said, finding a good whack can be satisfying."