Thursday, December 16, 2010

Looks Like 'Seasoned' and 'Professional' May Be on the Outs Anyway

Just saw a tweet from Ben Zimmer about a Google tool that lets you search book databases for keyphrases and keywords. So, with "seasoned professional" fresh in my mind, I did a search for it.

A chart of its occurrence shows a steady and marked increase in its use since the late 1920s until its sudden dropoff in the 2000s! I guess those two words are sick of each other, too.

I like this search engine. I like it a lot.

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4 comments:

Debbie Diesen said...

This link is really cool. I hadn't run across Books Ngram yet - now I can't stop graphing things!

June Casagrande said...

Me, too! I have a feeling I'm going to be using the site a lot from now on. But it makes me want more. I want it to show me all the data about the stuff I search for -- titles of the books, breakdowns by genre and topic, actual excerpts showing the keywords.

It's so amazing how spoiled we are by technology that I could actually want more than what this amazing search engine has to offer!

Adrian Morgan said...

Don't know if you saw my tweet where I linked to this result, showing that "Good" has been less popular than "evil" since about 1750.

I love that. Evil is winning! Mwahahahahaha!!! Except that I cheated by spelling "Good" with a capital letter but "evil" without a capital letter. Well, of course I cheated. I'm evil. What do you expect?

June Casagrande said...

Awesome! But not surprising that evil is winning. I bet if you went back into some of those very centuries-old texts you could decode prophecies of Fox News.

: )

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