A Googlewhack is a search in Google for a pair of real words which results in exactly one result, in a human-written webpage.

I think this has potential as a detector for writers getting carried slightly away with their powers of description, and overdone their plundering of Rogets.

So I’ve come up with a modified version.

Here are the rules:

1. Find a pair of words in a published article.
2. Do a Google search, enclosing them in quotes.
3. If the pair you have found is unique, then you have a Media Googlewhack.
4. The more ridiculous, the better.
5. If it is completely incomprehensible, then you get a gold star.

Here are a few examples.

“flagellating rhetoric”

There are two positions you could adopt. One is that the Chinese are violating human rights in varying ways, that your function as academic, as a writer, as someone concerned about human rights is to condemn, is to bring to bear all of your critical resources and most flagellating rhetoric.

“surgically ideological”

“Higher-education policy is where you can see the trick happening: the brazenness of Tory retrenchment policies in the field of social mobility being phrased as an inevitability, when they are surgically ideological.”

“animistic vitrines”

We simply wish to register our displeasure when the same believers dash around smashing in the animistic vitrines of their fellow citizens with big bricks made of bigotry and intolerance.

If you are looking for a displacement activity for a Friday … go and find some, and report back in the comments.

Michael Fowke
June 24, 2011 at 09:40

Don’t get worked up about it. Life’s too short.

SadButMadLad
June 24, 2011 at 10:14

I would suggest Laurie Penny as a starting point and then any Guardian CiF article followed by the Specator. Other good places would be any ‘progressive’ forum and local council press releases.

Daz Pearce
June 24, 2011 at 12:41

The crazy pseudo-intellectual left is indeed a breeding ground for such forays into linguistic randomness (there’s another one for you)…

http://outspokenrabbit.blogspot.com/

woodsy42
June 24, 2011 at 13:06

What a silly pastime!
Wierd how something like “Magnificent circumlocutions” dredges up a sale of earth moving equipment while “dyspeptic trivialities” finds an Indonesian skin care (?) page. Who would have thought it.

JohnM de Melle
June 24, 2011 at 15:12

I thought that you lived in France!

http: