Ben Zimmer, writer of the New York Times Magazine "On Language" column, plays with Google's new Ngram linguistic search tool and looks through lists of comparisons.
Post your suggestions from the Ngram search tool below
Ben Zimmer, writer of the New York Times Magazine "On Language" column, plays with Google's new Ngram linguistic search tool and looks through lists of comparisons.
Post your suggestions from the Ngram search tool below
Comments [12]
Follow up Friday? It's REALLY important to understand what OCR is in understanding this tool:
http://searchengineland.com/when-ocr-goes-bad-googles-ngram-viewer-the-f-word-59181
What you see is not necessarily what was printed (which is, by the way, not necessarily what was written).
Women (increases over time),
Venus (spikes at 1800 & 1900),
Gothic (high during the end of the gothic novel phase in 1800s, with recent increase),
1840-1860: Vampyr huge spike
Vampire peaking in 2000
Masculine — Recent HUGE spike!
Feminine — same
Milquetoast (a personal fave and oldie) inclining since 1980s
Lady Gaga returns a flat line
Do they take in to account more books published in the last few decades years than ever before?
Try happy/sad and good/evil.
Mother, mom is interesting.
Mother is consistently high through the decades.
Starting in the 1980s people publicly started using "my mom" instead of "my mother".
when did the words women's rights and feminist begin to appear
Bioterrorism
Try "oral sex" and "Monica Lewinski" - very interesting!
Consciousness has a decided dip between 1920 and 1960, thanks largely (I'm guessing) to the Behaviorist movement in American Psychology
"Palestinian Arab" and "Palestinian Jew"
How does the tool account for the varying connotations of words over time?
Try "socialism."
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