(Please) stop using our name as a verb!

You have to feel for Michael Krantz, the writer on Google’s official blog who was charged with explaining the company’s compulsion to fight the use of the word Google as a verb. It’s a losing battle, obviously, since “Googling” has long since become part of the vernacular. But anyone with a passing knowledge of trademark law knows Google has to defend its trademark or go the way of Xerox and Kleenex into what the legal eagles call “genericity.”