Feelin' googly

AS GOOGLE-WATCHERS await the company's first public stock sale, many are bullish and some are bearish, but one is downright snappish. Interviewed last week on NPR's "Talk of the Nation," Peri Fleisher of Santa Cruz, Calif., told Neal Conan she felt ripped off by the Internet search engine's success. Her great-uncle Edward Kasner was "the mathematician who identified and named the number googol," a one followed by 100 zeroes, and she was "pretty angry that they stole the word and never contacted us."

Well, who wouldn't like to claim a piece of Google? But Fleisher needs to get a grip. Her great-uncle couldn't have "identified" the number he called googol, which "existed" (as 10 to the 100th power) before his 1938 coinage, and in any case Kasner credited his 9-year-old nephew with suggesting the word.

The fine points of trademark law we'll leave to the experts, but googol was never a commercial product or service, just a word that caught on. If Kasner wanted to own it, he could have slapped it onto a company -- Googol Math Coaching, say -- and if SAT prep had been invented at the time, he might have. But he didn't, and so, like quark -- which physicist Murray Gell-Mann borrowed from "Finnegans Wake" in the 1960s, and which is now the name of a software company -- googol was common property.

But was it the inspiration for Google? Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin say yes; the company's website credits the googol, noting that "Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web." But let's face it, these people are all Californians; they may not know that the world existed before 1940, much less that there was a whole lotta googlin' goin' on in that prehistoric past. I suspect that both words, googol and Google, might have been picked up accidentally by their "coiners," like viruses from a doorknob.

The English were googling, after all, back about 1380, when the word was a variant spelling of goggle, to squint or "turn the eyes to one side or the other" according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Google could still be spelled that way in 1576, when Thomas Newton used it to mean "cause to shake," describing a weakness that "googleth their unstayed heads." Goggle became the common spelling, however, as the word evolved to mean "stare in disbelief" or "roll one's eyes."

The OED claims that google for goggle is obsolete, and refuses to commit itself on whether the variations from the dawn of the 20th century -- google-eyed (wearing glasses), googly-eyed (staring), goo-goo eyes (sappy lovers' looks) -- are revivals or new creations. But either way, they predate the googol by decades; the googly rolling peepers we associate with the "Sesame Street" crowd were familiar in America by the `20s, when the dictionary records an allusion to "movable googly eyes in hand-painted faces."

Then along came Barney Google, the cartoon character born in 1919 and still googling strong, if only as an occasional visitor to his comic-strip mate Snuffy Smith; Barney's bulging orbs were commemorated by Billy Rose in the 1923 song about "Barney Google, with his goog- goog- googley eyes." Google seekers must also take note of the century-old sporting googly: In cricket, it's "an off break bowled with an apparent leg-break action," in the words of the Oxford Concise Dictionary. That is, the thrown ball looks as if it will break in one direction, but thanks to its spin it will actually break the other way.

Did any of these uses influence the adoption of googol or Google? Who knows? Both the University of Michigan, where Google cofounder Page got his undergraduate degree, and Stanford, where he and Brin met in graduate school, have cricket teams; even if Page never left the computer lab, he might have heard some googly talk from a fellow student.

And that 9-year-old nephew of Kasner's, let's note, named the googol in the 1930s, a good decade for Barney Google: The comic strip was flourishing, and Barney also appeared in animated cartoons and comic books. Did the mathematician's helper unwittingly pluck those "nonsense" syllables from the funny papers?

We'll never know, because even the coiners can't say for sure; that's why lexicographers try not to rely on oral (or aural) recollections, no matter how reliable the source. But given the abundance of historical googling, it would seem rash for anyone to claim original inspiration. Though Google's lawyers will surely be stomping on any new seedlings, a hundred googles have already bloomed in the language we share.

E-mail freeman@globe.com. For a month's worth of The Word, visit www.boston.com/ideas/freeman.