To Bing or Not To Bing?

Microsoft recently launched what it apparently hopes will be a Google-slaying new search engine called Bing. The guys in marketing were apparently quite deliberate in choosing a name for their new search engine that could be conscripted into service as a verb, a la "googling." You can see this in an open letter to users, in which the Bing Team enthuses, "We sincerely hope that the next time you need to make an important decision, you'll Bing and decide."

I spot three problems with this potential verb. First, written in its presumed participial and past tense forms ("binging" and "binged," respectively) "to bing" is indistinguishable from "to binge." That's not the sort of ambiguity that I'd generally like to invite.

Secondly, the nearest English verb prototypes for "to bing" are probably "to bring," "to fling," "to ring," and "to sing," all of which are irregular verbs. You don't form the past tense of any of these verbs by adding -ed. No, you turn them into "brought," "flung," "rang," and "sang." Try those endings out on "to bing": "bought," "bung," "bang." And now see how you like substituting those into the sentence, "Last month, I googled Sonia Sotomayor maybe fifteen different times."

(Imagining "bung" entering the vocabulary as a past tense verb puts an inexplicably resilient smile on my face, I have to admit.)

Lastly, the participial form "binging," is just an unpleasant mouthful to spit out. It rhymes with itself in a cloying, ugly, nasalized guttural way. Those double -ng's are just too much damn work. We put up with them in "bringing," etc., because those are part of our native vocabulary, but no marketing manager is going to get me to use as demonstrably foul-sounding a word as "binging" just because it was the best he could come up with.

The Bing people were right to note that the verb form "to google" gives Google a word of mouth marketing advantage. The word makes for a pleasant mouthfeel. But on the Internet, these verbs spring up all the time, even when they aren't quite so easy and obvious, as long as the service is actually good for something; "to facebook," "to imdb," and even "to wikipedia," are all verbs I've encountered in real life. So I'm partially annoyed that Microsoft ever decided to make the verbiness of its search engine's name central to its ad campaign. Build a better product, and your users will take care of the linguistic bits for you. But what sends me over the edge is that, having decided that it coveted Google's verbiness, Microsoft couldn't come up with a name any less problematic than "Bing" in terms of precision, morphology, and phonology.