Does it have anything to do with Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels where he finds creatures that look like humas but act like animals who call themselves "Yahoos"?
2006-12-06 06:48:23 · 4 answers · asked by NatlBean 1 in Arts & Humanities ➔ Books & Authors
Yes but I imagine the choice was meant to be ironic and funny, not literal. In the broader snese a yahoo is a boorish cultureless person. And yahoo programs.rise well above that. I notice that people have not been put off by tjhe unflattering Swiftian associations of the name. Chalk it up to a good sense of humor. I must confess that when I first heard it several years ago I foung the choice puzzling. The eminently rational creatures in the same fourth book of "Gulliver's Travels'" are the horses--more like the people who run complex computer programs.
2006-12-06 07:03:39 · answer #1 · answered by tirumalai 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
This is a link offering possible inspirations as far as Jonathan Swift's word Yahoo was concerned. http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:sQsySC0oAS0J:www.geocities.com/sanskritpuns99/yahoo1.html+yahoo+swift&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 One could argue that any of these sources led to the name we know so well on the Internet.
2006-12-06 06:57:34 · answer #2 · answered by Doethineb 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
That is coincidental. Yahoo was orignally an E-mail service. Apple, at the time, had this voice program that said"You got Mail"
Yahoo's program said"Yahooooo!" A form of greeting to announce that E-mail had been delivered.
2006-12-06 06:54:11 · answer #3 · answered by Sophist 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
i was just about to say i think that's where it originally comes from, but before yahoo.com started, the word yahoo made its way into the english language as a kind of savage, after the book.
2006-12-06 06:52:33 · answer #4 · answered by alia_vahed 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋