I was going to write some thoughts on language and prohibition in terms of the Olympics, which turns of sporting phrase might become more or less common as people continue to communicate about the Olympics, whilst being wary of the Official Words in the LOCOG stable. I might explore this at a later date: will the phrase "third place" become more common, will "bronze" be replaced by the less evocative, but also less bureaucratically contentious, "third" and so forth.
But I came across something peculiar. For the title of the original post, I thought it might be apt to do a phoneticised spelling - saying "olympics" without saying it, as it were - but without using the phonetic alphabet.
I settled on "ehlimpiks". As this is not an unfeasible combination of consonant and vowel sounds, I ran it through google to check I wasn't saying something awful about someone's mother in a tongue unknown to me.
The funny thing is, "ehlimpiks", despite not orthographically resembling the word "olympics" very much (missing the vital first letter O in terms of written recognition), "ehlimpiks" returns the same top google results and sponsored links as the word "olympics".
I tried it with a few more:
Returns the same top and sponsored results as "olympics":
Returns no results, but a suggestion to search for "olympics", and some unrelated terms:
Returns results for Olympus cameras, but not the Olympics, for some reason:
Now, this doesn't appear to be an unusual search engine optimisation (if any SEO nerds want to get in touch, I'd be really interested in how widespread this phoneticising is, and how it works) - "phasebokk" returns all the top results for "facebook", for example.
Accommodating phonetic spelling in search engines is brilliant for information accessibility, and it seems that this is not a corporate peculiarity of the Olympics. But I do think it gives us an interesting perspective on ownership of words, in a situation where a heavily corporatised entity is attempting, and fully expecting to succeed, in controlling use of words they didn't even come up with, that are used commonly in contexts other than their event.
Does LOCOG own "erlympecs"? Well, no. But its use in a search engine will deliver the same results as the orthographically correct spelling, so it is linked the brand in its own way. If you think of it in terms of key value pair, it's valid, or rather has been made valid by the folks who have official ownership over "olympics".
LOCOG may not 'own' "erlympics", but, depending on your accent, it's an approximation of a pronunciation that you might well use, and be fully understood as the sounds that correspond to the writing "olympics". The words in your mouth - the way you pronounce them - are now connected to the brand.
An inherent property of branding, I always thought, was some orthographic mark, a graphical property that belonged only to the way words are written down to communicate a message of the company. But here we have a private entity explicitly taking ownership of words, in whatever form they're written, and the phonetic aspect gives us some insight there, I think.
Accessibility to information is so important, and kicking it to prescriptivism and exclusion based on standard forms is great, but it occurs to me that this might not be LOCOGs primary motivating factor in optimising their search results like this. Either way, it's an interesting blur between the written and spoken, and exposes the bizarre nature of trying to own a common word, whether it's combined into a branded logo or not.
"Olympics" has a meaning when it's written, but it also codes for sounds - not the most sensible sounds in terms of the letters it uses, because English is like that - but I think "olympics" is as much part of the word I produce when I say it as "uhlimpiks". In a scenario of literate speakers, the written codes for sounds, and the sounds can be transcribed into the written, they belong to each other.
Crucially, in written or spoken form, respectively, they communicate the same thing, and LOCOGs SEO allows for the spoken nature of words associated with it to lead to the same heavily branded place as typed words - google doesn't understand that, someone wrote that in. Looked at in that way, it feels oddly like someone's trying to take ownership of the very words in our mouths.
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