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Duck.com now points to DuckDuckGo, not Google
Non-tracking search engine, DuckDuckGo, is now a little easier to find online after the company acquired the premium generic domain name duck.com — thereby shaving a few letters off its usual URL. This means browsing to duck.com now automatically redirects to DuckDuckGo.com.
The twist in this tale is that duck.com's prior owner was Google. And DDG had accused the search giant of anti-competitive behavior — by pointing duck.com to its own search engine, Google.com, and thus "consistently" confusing DDG users (duck.co having long pointed to the DDG community page.)...
[...] [Calls] for antitrust scrutiny of tech giants have been rising in the US. And Google's dominant position in Internet search and smartphone platforms, along with its pincer grip (along with Facebook) on the online ad market, position it for some special attention on that front. So the company quietly passing off duck.com now — after using it to redirect to Google.com for close to a decade — to a pro-privacy search rival smacks of concern over competition optics, at the very least.
Also at Gizmodo.
Previously: Google Throws DuckDuckGo a Bone, Adds Redirect on duck.com Landing Page
(Score: 4, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday December 14 2018, @11:45PM (4 children)
I don't like it because the word was clearly abused for this meaning by some uneducated "journalist" and spread through the media community, like many, many other victims of the English language. Instead of reaching for a thesaurus, people experience recency bias and propagate these usages of the word due to exposure to crappy modern media and popular culture. I don't care that you could construct a contrived explanation for its new meaning.
Our words have a long, noble history that can often be traced back millennia. I hate that this is getting stomped on by some asshole trying to fill out their article quota for the month picking a random word that is in any way slightly related to the concept he is trying to express. I get that language is organic. New words have been created for historically important reasons: to describe new concepts and technologies, to avoid bans, in response to significant historic events. I don't want our words to have a footnote: "this meaning emerged because some asshole in the 21st century couldn't bother to spend an extra five seconds thinking of the correct word to use."
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(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:08AM (3 children)
Sorry, but nope. The word wasn't "abused," nor is this a particularly novel usage. A few quick searches could have told you this usage is over 40 years old, seemingly promoted by (if not originating within) the Carter Administration.
As for the rest of your rant, I too used to be an angry pedant. Then I started reading actual scholarly works on the history of English usage. And then I realized that for every legitimate point the pedants have about supposed neologisms or bad usage or imprecise language, they also believe 10 other things that are utter BS, generally supposed "rules" created out of nothing by some idiot pedant decades or centuries ago who just didn't like how something sounded to him and simply declared standard English usage of the time to be "wrong."
Since then, I've come to the opinion that pedantry likely abuses and perverts language as much as (if not more than) it protects it.
I'll not defend this meaning of "optics," but neither am I bothered by it. As others have pointed out, it's a reasonable figurative extension of traditional meanings.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday December 15 2018, @02:15PM (1 child)
Oddly enough, in general I agree with you. What gets my goat is people appropriating precise technical terms and using them in contexts that detract from the technical meaning. Where you can't find a word that means what you want to say (thesauruses* can be helpful here) a short descriptive phrase or a neologism is fine. Mugging an existing word and making it less precise riles me. I agree with people who say that the point of language is to communicate: and therefore, imprecision in language hinders communication, so deliberate introduction of imprecision is to be avoided. Obviously opinions differ in this regard and it is fruitless arguing over the point: a case of de gustibus non est disputandum [wikipedia.org].
*Some might say thesauri, but unfortunately my Latin is not good enough guaranteed to correctly decline a second declension noun that originates from the Greek θησαυρός. It used to be a mark of learning to sprinkle your writings with grammatically correct Greek and Latin; but getting it wrong is a terrible faux pas; and many authorities now will opine that using an Anglo-Saxon plural is perfectly acceptable - so the plural of octopus can be octopuses, rather than octopodes (or even ὀκτώπόδες ); and the plural of virus can be viruses.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday December 15 2018, @02:21PM
not good enough guaranteed to correctly decline
The above was an error in editing. It should read: "not good enough to guarantee correctly to decline" or "not good enough to guarantee declining correctly"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday December 16 2018, @10:07PM
40 years is a short time. A large proportion of words can be traced back to Latin or further, and have served their purposes well. I agree with pTamok, if there is already a word for the precise concept you're trying to express, using a word that does not describe that concept and beating it in with the power of mass media is a disservice to the English language. We already have lots of words with colorful but precise semantics forming a vibrant and useful language, these abuses instead dilute and cloud the meanings of words, making the language muddy and less useful.
Those "rules" created out of nothing mostly made the language more precise and thus useful, or simplified needless complexity. Those rules may have been arbitrary, but they served an important purpose, that *some one* pick *some way* of clarifying the language where confusing ambiguity existed, and that role naturally falls to the "idiot pedant" who cares about language than the everyone who doesn't care, despite benefiting from a tool of communication honed by "idiot pedants". That doesn't mean that "idiot pedants" are never wrong, just that they are motivated by a love for language that most people don't have.
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