Language & Grammar discussion

Google Books has a new tool. It'll search their database and tell you how usage of a word has changed over the years. Not how the meaning has changed, just how many times the word is used.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?co...

Cool! The word 'worth' peaked in popularity in the late 1600's!!

I graphed "brain fever."

Its use spiked in the latter part of the 19th century, then dropped off as medicine began breaking the diagnosis down into discrete illnesses. I run across that expression often in my reading, and it's interesting to see how steep the graph is.

I don't really get it.

just plop in a word, NE, and it'll give you a graph charting the year by year usage of that word.

That I get, but it's just a bunch of zig-zags like an EKG. So, I get a vague idea of usage.

Guess I'm not a chart guy (which explains my flight from the business world some 30 years ago).

Top 10 overused buzzwords in LinkedIn Profiles in the USA — 2010:



1. Extensive experience

2. Innovative

3. Motivated

4. Results-oriented

5. Dynamic

6. Proven track record

7. Team player

8. Fast-paced

9. Problem solver

10. Entrepreneurial

Who compiles these lists by the way.

Ruth wrote: "Google Books has a new tool. It'll search their database and tell you how usage of a word has changed over the years. Not how the meaning has changed, just how many times the word is used.

http://..."
A very interesting exercise, Ruth. I'm not sure what the percentage means, however. Is the word 'the' found in only 6% of English books? The use of 'dragon' peaked around 1575, while snow peaked around 1890, with a recent upswing. Firestorm did not appear prior to 1950, but surged in recent years. Happiness has been in decline since 1830, while sadness showed an increase to 1900, then declined to the 1960's but has been on the increase ever since.

I noticed when I plugged in the word "electricity" that its use peaked about 1775, according to the graph. The y-axis is measuring word use as a percentage of what was in print that year. That makes it tricky to make year-to-year comparisons because the quantity of written material has gone up dramatically since 1500.

That graph is so amazingly cool!

I wonder how on each one would even construct an algorithm to create a graph like that for any word in the language. That must have been a methodological bugbear.

The word "melancholia" spikes at around 1590, disappears for the entire seventeenth century, only to return at a much smaller level around 1720.

And why was "Paris Hilton" registering circa 1970? Hmm.

Jan, I don't think many words will have a 6% appearance rate. That sounds sort of high. I chose a random, common word - monkey - and it peaked around .0008% around 1970. Which means that it appears in 1 in every 125,000 published works, I'm guessing.

It could be that the .0057 percentage rate reflects the Plague Year when 23,000 published works appeared to disappear 1 in 4.3 times when skewed 4% with a 2.5 accuracy rate.

(Now I'm getting it. I think.)

Paris Hilton c1970.....the hotel!

I understand how "Hilton" would have showed up, Debbie, but I'm still a little perplexed by the "Paris." I specifically searched "Paris Hilton." To paraphrase John Lennon, is she not the only one?

Paris Hilton = the Hilton Hotel in Paris

Like the Sydney Hilton, London Hilton etc....

They named her after a certain hotel? How ... high class. I guess that gives me permission to name my first born girl Formica Dinette.

Or Mother's Old Couch.

....or Backseat Chevy

How about Back Seat Dodge?

Mark Harden's Artchive Kienholz, Ed
Back Seat Dodge '38
1964
Tableau: polyester resin, paint, fiberglass, and flock, truncated 1938 Dodge, clothing, chicken wire, beer bottles, artificial grass, and plaster cast
66 x 240 x 144 in. (167.6 x 609.6 x 365.8 cm)
Los Angeles County Museum of Ar

Happy Birthday, 2002 Rose Zinfandel!

Hold on a minute, who is that in that Back Seat Dodge?

Either two people or a dismembered mannequin.....

You know, mannequins can be sexy sometimes.

Debbie wrote: "Either two people or a dismembered mannequin....."

It's two people, and set off an enormous furor when the LA Co Museum of Art showed it in 1964.

My mother always told me to hold out for a man with an Aston Martin.

??? OK, I'm lost by the word usage here. ???

We have been naughty, NE. Naughty, however, reached its peak use in 1675. As did the f word.

It's John's mother who is confusing me. I put in Aston Martin just for kicks, though.

My mother is a confusing woman. Margaret Turner, my mother's maiden name, reached peaks around 1800, 1860, and 1980, topping out at a whopping .0000006%.

This should clear things up....

octopi

Word Origin & History

octopus
1758, genus name of a type of eight-armed cephalopod mollusks, from Gk. oktopous "eight-footed," from okto "eight" (see eight) + pous "foot." Proper plural is octopodes, though octopuses probably works better in English. Octopi is from mistaken assumption that -us is the L. noun ending that takes -i in plural.