Comment by Suppafly
>So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name.
A lot of these 'mysteries' that get brought up over and over online tend to have very easy to figure out answers, but people would rather be confused for some reason.
They are words out of their context and humans love to make meaning. Think how surreal things will get now that time has sped up from Chandler’s time.
As mysteries they are powerful. So far there was only 1 commenter that knew of Barney Google. The knowledge spreads the mystery dies.
I knew nothing of the passage before this thread and when I was reading through the comments. I thought this was recent sci-fi that was being posted at a site called tv tropes.
The Google reference was obviously a future form factor for Google services.