![]() That’s about fifty or sixty times more frequent than God ever was. But the highest one I found is consistently at 5% to 6% straight through from 1700 to 2000. It’s pretty easy to find ones that get to 1% or 2%. Here’s the challenge: find words that have the greatest frequency over the longest period of time. Google Ngram Viewer shows how good fortune and yelp have occurred on timeline 800K. And the most frequent word in the graphs above, “one,” only gets up to about 0.2%. 4 / 5 31 Foursquare 6 / 10 58 Google 262 Trip 60 Facebook 4. Even at Captain Kirk’s height in 2000, he only reached up to 0.000008% of all words. Perhaps you’ve noticed the y-axes on these graphs. They've taken their five million digitized books spanning the last five hundred years - holy cow already - and made a. So something happened in the 1980’s that turned writers away from “one, two, three.” and toward “1,2,3.” If there is blame to go around for this, I hereby fling some at Bill Gates in his parents’ garage, tinkering with computers. Surely you've seen it, GeekMoms: the new Google tool called Ngram Viewer. The pattern repeats itself for all nine digits, albeit at lower and lower frequencies. Why? I first thought it reflected a decline in use of the universal pronoun “one,” as in the sentence, “One should not take Ngram results too seriously.” But then I checked “two” vs. Writers used the word “one” way more often than the numeral 1, until about 1980 when the numeral caught up and even surpassed it. This reflects the rise of science maybe?Īnd here’s another freaky numerical thing: But you have too much dignity for that, I know.)Īlso, the slope of all these lines is gently upward, so over these 200 years, people have been using more and more numbers in their books, as a percentage of all words. Unless of course you leave comments begging - pleading - for me to disclose. So strange! (Dear reader: I have a theory on why this is so, but won’t bore you with it here. So there are more 1’s than 2’s, more 2’s than 3’s, and so on. ![]() Ladies, we cannot stand for this.įourth Thing: The Strange World of Digits And it’s great that the two words do a lovely hand-in-hand rising dance between 1920 and about 1980, but then what? Vaginas trail off and penises take the lead. I see our friend Sigmund Freud behind that one, nursing his terrible case of vagina envy. The part I do believe is the plunge in vaginas in about 1920. ![]() What’s with that big vaginal spike from 1840 to 1920? Were they really writing about vaginas that much more than about penises? I just don’t believe it. ![]()
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