Right on time, Merriam & Webster

I knew it was coming.
The lexical Powers-That-Be at Merriam-Webster have added the verb "google" to their dictionary, CNN reported today. I feel a bit like "that guy" who wants to be sure everyone knows that he's been listening to a band's music since the days no one had heard of them. That's the pride that comes with the "language is dynamic" mentality. I have thoroughly enjoyed using the verb "to google" for some time now, but I know most all of you have too, so I'll shut up now.

In other news, I googled "trip the light fandango" yesterday because the phrase popped into my head - a (misheard) line from the song "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by some band I'd never heard of, but Annie Lennox sang it on her album "Medusa" so I thought it was her song. Years later I realized that the entire album was cover songs. Moving on... I never knew what the line meant, but sang it just the same. (Trust me, there's a connection - it's about language being dynamic.) The song lyrics are actually "We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels 'cross the floor. I was feeling kinda seasick, but the crowd called out for more."
"Trip the light fantastic" is the more common phrase and has roots in Shakespeare and Milton, meaning to dance nimbly or lightly. Wikipedia made a point to mention that it is a verb phrase, which made me stop to consider the two possible ways one could read it. If fantastic is the chosen noun, then light is an adjective. However, I think it could also work - because it's poetic either way - if light is the noun and fantastic is the adjective that got placed on the end, like it does in Spanish and other languages.
This little exercise in syntactic analysis probably doesn't interest anyone who is reading it - save perhaps for my nerdy friend KC.
It's like looking at the sentence "Robert is an American History professor." This sentence gives us no clue as to whether Robert is professor of American History or if he is a History professor who is an American. Tickles your brain, right?

Sheesh. Sometimes when I start to talk to people about what I think are exciting thoughts about linguistics, I feel like Matthew Cuthbert in "Anne of Green Gables" who said that "picking up them ugly white grubs in the cucumber bed" gives him a thrill.
Well... to each his own.

(It is important to note that I googled "matthew cuthbert" and "grubs" in order to find the exact quote from the movie, which, I must add, is not the quote from the book.)