I am working on a dissertation dealing with the campaign for the neologism of the word “santorum.” Basically, several years ago presidential candidate and former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum offended a group of people, and through a planned Internet campaign the word “santorum” was systematically redefined to mean… well, something gross. Go ahead, Google it. I’ll wait. Just make sure your kids, your boss or your elderly grandparents aren’t looking over your shoulder.
See?
So as part of my research, I wanted to do a small experiment on the birth of a word on the Internet. It’s not the best made-up word my kids have come up with, but I chose it for several reasons: 1) it’s innocuous, 2) it’s similar to an existing word- alleviation – which is in common use in the English language, 3) it’s easy to use in a sentence, and 4) it wasn’t found on the Urban Dictionary, which automatically disqualified several other words from the experiment.
I am not expecting the word to become commonplace or in widespread use. Rather, I am just measuring the changes in the Google search results over a period of a few weeks. To do this, I have asked people to simply post a link to the website defining the word aliveation. Besides seeing where the domain name ends up in the search, I am also looking to see if Google eventually stops trying to correct the spelling – ie, “Did you mean alleviation?”
If you could help me out by posting this link on Facebook or Twitter or your blog or your conspiracy theory forum, that would be great. As a reward there is a video of puppies on the landing page. That is unrelated to anything other than the fact that puppies are cute.
Thank you muchly.
