Google This

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," according to Google itself. And this is a swell mission, except that it apparently doesn't apply to all information. Information about Google bigwigs, for example -- even fairly innocuous stuff and things that lie squarely in the public record -- well, the Goog would just as soon keep that kind of info to itself. According to News.com, Google took exception to reporter Elinor Mills using Google to gather some data on Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a story about how easy it is to use Google to Google people. Mills didn't publish the results of Schmidt's last prostate exam; she simply used the company's own search engine to gather up some nuggets like how much Schmidt pulled in selling his stock in the last two months (at least $50 million), that he's an amateur pilot, and that he attended Burning Man. This didn't sit so well with Google, which chose to retaliate by saying that it'll refuse to speak to News.com for the next year.

This brings us to today's manners lesson: Make irony your friend. If you're a big public company -- well, no, let's use a more accessible example. Let's say you're a private citizen, just some guy named Al. And let's say that you, Al, have made untold billions providing millions of computer users a comprehensive and efficient system for accessing information, and that a pesky reporter uses your own technology to access information about your CEO, and that this fairly innocent and common bit of journalistic methodology for some reason infuriates you (Al). How to punish her? Why, by withholding information! It's positively brilliant! And it isn't that you, Al, as an average guy, have corporate America's sociopathic need to control the agenda of any meeting in which you sit; it's just that you have a puckish sense of humor and really, really enjoy the madcap use of rhetorical devices! And by golly, the next time somebody pisses you off you might just whip some metonymy on 'em, or brush 'em back with some synecdoche, or -- whoa! -- even go all anadiplosis on 'em! Heeeaaah!