Fateful Faithful reader Stuart Semmel emailed that he had just heard an American reporter use the verb “hoovering” on National Public Radio. As it happened, I had also heard Bobby Allyn, talking about Elon Musk’s recent decision to limit the number of tweets individuals can see: “Musk says this is all about artificial intelligence companies, right? They train AI models, as we know, by hoovering up tons of data from websites like Twitter.” (Almost predictably, Allyn used the now near-mandatory Zuck-talk “right?”)
I’ve written several times about “hoover,” derived from the vacuum company, often (but not always) followed by “up,” and meaning, according to the OED, “To consume or take in voraciously; to devour completely.” But when I Googled the word before answering Stuart, I found almost the entire first screen’s worth of results had to do with a meaning I was unaware of. It’s not in the OED or Green’s Dictionary of Slang, but an Urban Dictionary post from 2010 has it as one of nine (count ’em, nine) “hoover” definitions:
v. colloquial Being manipulated back into a relationship with threats of suicide, self-harm, or threats of false criminal accusations. Relationship manipulation often associated with individuals suffering from personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
The next example I could find was in the title of a 2017 book by (American) Amber Ault: Hoovering: How to Resist the Pull of a Toxic Relationship & Recover Your Freedom Now. And the word seems to be very much still out there, as witness 2022 articles in Psychology Today and Bustle. Those are both American publications, which leads me to suspect that psychological hoovering is an American coinage. But I’m not sure and would be interested in evidence either way.
notoneoffbritishisms.com 
All the extended meanings are irrelevant because they all come from a false origin. Hoover as a verb, like google as a verb and many others, is an absurdity in which mentally lazy people join the vast hordes of mentally lazy people and willingly, without payment, advertise large companies.
The absurdity was very well illustrated by the cleaning woman who stated that she liked to hoover with her Dyson.
Irrelevant? Absurdity? Mentally lazy people?
Language is like that. A new coinage may come from a mishearing; a malapropism; an advertiser’s need for brevity’; a teenage craze and countless other things which don’t fit into the rational realm.
Were it not for these very human agents of change, wouldn’t we still be saying ‘Ugg’, or whatever primative people said?
Have you ever referred to ‘buttering’ instead of ‘spreading’ or ‘drilling’ rather than ‘boring’? Speakers have been verbing nouns for a long time but I think the ones that we encounter for the first time in later life annoy us most.
Every time that I provide a simple comment about language, someone indignantly defends, by denying, the deterioration of language.
I was referring to the use of the name of a company or one of its products instead of an appropriate verb. To ‘google’ something is to advertise the company, or its product, while relieving oneself of what appears to be an intolerable burden for most people: thinking of, or finding, the right word. It also displays a lack of logical reasoning. You don’t encyclopaedia a fact; you don’t dictionary a word; you don’t even dyson your carpet.
This isn’t about the dubious practice of forming verbs from nouns: this is entirely about using company names and products as verbs.
(I wonder what would have happened if Yahoo or Ask Jeeves had become the main search system. ‘What’s the population of Turkey?’ ‘Yahoo it.’)
In passing, I don’t butter bread; because it is erroneous in the use of language; and because I use coconut oil. To accept ‘butter’ as a verb would require me to use ‘coconut oil’ as a verb.
Yeah. Exactly. “Hoovering” in the context you talk about seems to refer to Hoover as a common-to-the-point-of-ubiquitous vacuum cleaners. In other words, it sucks other things up into its own territory, whether it’s physical stuff on the floor or emotional problems you or other people are experiencing.
I had not heard (or even read) “Zuck talk” until now, though, so thanks for that.
Side note: “Fateful” reader?
Oops.
I’ve never heard it in that context. I think it must be an American use of the term.
Probably, but I’m an American and I hadn’t heard it either till two days ago.
I wonder if it is a counseling/psychology trade word. I’ve never read or heard it anywhere. I asked my brother, who run a counseling practice, and he’d never heard of it.
One thing to bear in mind with such topics as this is that with the internet and social media, a misuse, a parochially popular expression, a business phrase, the casual use of vulgarities, can all spread around the world in seconds and be absorbed and passed on.
It would be so much easier and more descriptive to say ‘sucked back into a relationship’. It sounds like an attempt to create jargon.
Just to say I’m British, and I’ve never heard it.
And why are all posts being labelled as from [1] and not by name? Seems to be on all topics.
I’m not sure what’s going on with the [1]s. I’ll look into it.–Ben
Names are back now. Did you do something?
Would the gentleman who objects to the use google as a verb tell us what expression he woud use? As I invariably use google I really am googling.The objection to turning nouns into verbs is surely mistaken. Many verbs were originally derived from nouns. There is no noun that cannot be verbed.
I am that gentleman. I explained that on this occasion, I am not objecting to the use of nouns as verbs: I am objecting to the use of company and product names as verbs. Do people not remember living before Google? How did they find information before Google? They did research, they looked things up, they found things, they investigated, they checked, they ascertained. They used language. It’s a very simple point.
As for ‘verbed’, there is sufficient cause for objection merely by applying the standards of euphony: it sounds like the sudden and violent emission of disagreeable food.
Google is succint and accurate.
You can look things up and investigate without using the internet. If you want to make clear that you used a search engine to find information, “looked up” isn’t good enough.
I don’t use or like Google (prefer DuckDuckGo), so I tend to say “did a search”. But I’ve got nothing against the word as such, and do claim to have pretty good “google-fu”. Can’t really claim to have ducky-fu! I’ve also never touched Photoshop software in my life, but have photoshopped plenty of pictures (or ‘shopped, or shooped).
Brand names have been absorbed into general English for as long as there have been brand names. Plundering is what English does best.
I’m cutting off this conversation now as I feel everyone made their points and it’s getting repetitive.
Hi Ben, here: http://www.bpdfamily.org/2010/09/bpd-news-is-it-hoover-or-is-it.html is a 2010 usage in the relationship sense, on a U.S. psych/relationship website. And it seems to suggest already the term is getting mis-used.
Is this connected to J Edgar Hoover rather than the vacuum cleaner?
I, Canadian, have never used “hoover” for vacuuming although I have always known that it’s a vacuum brand. However, I and others of my vintage, use it to describe the actions of the person who goes to the buffet and removes a lot of food in one go. I remember snickering with a friend as we saw two very dignified judges at the buffet load their plates with a stupefying amount of the choicest delicacies, depleting the table in one swoop, that they were “hoovering all the hors d’oeuvres down in record time”. It only occurred to me in reading this column that it makes more sense to say “hoovering up” but that is never the way we said it. It was always “down”.