When Gulliver came across that race of brutes known as Yahoos during his travels to fantastic lands, who could have guessed that one day that name would be worth $200 billion on Wall Street? Coined by Jonathan Swift in his masterly 1726 satire "Gulliver's Travels," the word has come a long way in its nearly 300-year-old journey to becoming one of the best-known Internet addresses in the world. It was Swift's genius that led to several coinages from his famous book entering the English language, including "Brobdingnagian" (something very big), "Lilliputian" (something very small) and "Laputan" (impractical visionary).

But the most popular among them is the one picked in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang for their newly incubated brainchild, Yahoo! According to the Yahoo! Web site, Filo and Yang chose it because they liked what the word represented: someone uncouth and unsophisticated. However, they later explained that the name was an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."

Their idea was, no doubt, brilliant, as later events have proved, but one has to wonder whether their company would have been as successful if it had been named, say, Acme Internet Solutions.

While it took an 18th-century satirist to name the world's best-known Internet directory, another site, Google, the darling among Internet search engines, owes its name to a 9-year-old boy. In the 1930s, mathematician Edward Kasner asked his nephew, Milton Sirotta, what he thought would be a good word to describe a laaaarge number -- say, 1 followed by 100 zeros. With a twinkle in his eye, Milton promptly suggested the word "googol."

Decades later, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then computer science grad students at Stanford University, devised a clever new way to index the Brobdingnagian Web, they knew exactly what to name it. No Laputans, they derived a name for that uncannily precise search engine, Google, from "googol." Ah, what a fitting name for the indispensable tool that knows about billions and billions of Web pages lying in the nooks and crannies of the Web and can choose from among them just the right page!

Who said engineering is boring, that techies don't have a sense of humor, that nerds don't know much beyond bits and bytes? We engineers, in our logical world of computers, networks and the Internet, rely on fiction, wordplay and whimsy to name our languages, products, business and services. And ourselves. Take the word "nerd" itself, for example. This term made its debut in an unlikely source. Do you know where these lines come from?: "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!"

If you guessed Dr. Seuss' 1950 book, "If I Ran the Zoo," you get stock options for -- well, never mind, just pat yourself on the back. Feedback from my A. Word. A. Day subscribers suggests that it may have evolved from "knurd," the word "drunk" spelled backward, but that explanation smacks of folk etymology. Most likely, the term was born as a nonsense word in the mind of Dr. Seuss, just as countless other words were. (The word "grinch" is another of his coinages that has found a place in the hallowed pages of the English-language dictionary.)

How did "nerd" become a term referring to a studious misfit? Nobody really knows. The specific usage origin may be lost in the mists of time, but it's easy to see its transition from being a term for a social misfit to an engineer and then to a computer engineer. At a certain point, nerds began employing the term in a positive sense in the same way people within a racial group refer to each other by using terms that may be derogatory if used by someone outside the group.

Nerds go after bugs with the same zeal that Beowulf had for slaying monsters. Commonly used to refer to a defect in a computer or computer program, this three-letter "bug" has many meanings. Consider the following definitions, culled from the responses of linguaphiles on A. Word. A. Day:

* a person of high importance: "He's a big bug."
* an object of terror
* an insect: "June bug"
* an enthusiast: "a stamps bug"
* a germ: "I've caught the flu bug."
* a burglar-alarm system
* a concealed microphone
* to annoy: "Don't bug me any more."
* to leave: "Bug off, now!"

While the use of the word "bug" to refer to problems discovered in computers is figurative, there is at least one example of a real bug being found in a computer. Adm. Grace Hopper of the U.S. Navy, a computing pioneer and the inventor of the COBOL programming language, told a story in which an operator solved a glitch in Harvard's Mark II computer by removing an insect from one of its relays.

Even earlier, Edison, the inveterate inventor, used the word to describe a problem in his phonograph. The Oxford English Dictionary cites this quotation from the March 11, 1889, issue of the Pall Mall Gazette: "Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering "a bug" in his phonograph -- an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble."

So when did a "bug" become a defect in a computer or software? Etymological expeditions led by The New Hacker's Dictionary indicate that by Edison's era, this term was well established in the sense of a glitch in a device.

And nothing bugs Netters more than spam. So how did we come to refer to that bane of all e-mail users as "spam"? According to Hormel's Spam Web site, it came from one of the skits of the British comedy troupe Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which a group of Vikings patronize a restaurant where every dish comes accompanied with Spam (Spam being, of course, SPiced hAM, made by Hormel Foods). The Vikings get carried away and sing a rousing chorus of "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam," drowning out all other conversation.

Internetters, a good number of whom are fans of Monty Python -- guess where the name for the programming language Python comes from? -- seized on the term to describe the torrent of unwanted e-mail messages that sadly drowns out other useful messages, just like "Spam" did for the Vikings.

Today a typical mailbox is filled with a batch of messages in which the ratio of useful-to-spam e-mails has become Lilliputian. As if these messages hawking diet pills, porn, fake college degrees, phony driver's licenses and $13 million of Nigerian loot were not bad enough, they now often come with a disclaimer that rubs salt into the injury: "We never send unsolicited mail. You are receiving this e-mail because you signed up for it." I wonder, if Dante were to revisit the inferno today, whether he wouldn't discover a spammer or two in the inner circles.

What a bunch of yahoos they are when they bug us nerds with googols of spam!
