Ngrams: one more way to win an argument using Google
I thought I’d never see a definitive answer to this one, but thanks to the brand-new Google NGrams Viewer, the facts are clear:
It is “another think coming,” and it has always been “another think coming.”
A lot of words and phrases (though not these) show a dip starting in 2000 or so. I wonder if the nature of the corpus changes at that point to include more words? You see the same effects with name frequencies — the frequency of any given name has been decreasing over the last twenty years, just because names are getting more and more widely distributed; the most popular names today take up a smaller share of namespace than much lower-ranked names did in the 1950s. A quick and dirty thing to check would be the entropy of the word distribution; is it going up with time?
Lots of good ngram examples on Tom Scocca’s blog, here and here.
Oh, and here’s the Four Shortstops:
Ripken, appropriately, is showing great staying power.
Filed under: baseball, computers, language | 7 Comments
Tags: another think coming, English, google, ngrams, words
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Cool…
Any insight on the rise of the flabbergasted?
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=nonplussed, flabbergasted &year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
“He” occurs consistently about twice as often as “she” and yet with “him” and “her” it’s reversed!
But maybe “her” should also be paired with “his”, which wins.
If you put in a year, then for some reason the year it appeared the most seems to be consistently 4 years later.
Eggs Benedict is smoked by kippers, which, in turn, has recently been passed by crumpets.
Here’s a Facebook page we made to share interesting ngrams:
http://www.facebook.com/nteresting.ngrams