Using Google Ngram you can now search occurrences of words in books from 1500 to present. There are some entertaining results at informationisbeautiful.net.
Some fun searches I've run are:
truth, beauty (spoiler - truth wins)
Fame,fortune (fame really isn't what it used to be)
Physics,Chemistry,Biology (Chemistry - from 1st to third)
logic,emotion (logic with the late surge)
snap,crackle,pop (surprising)
more,less (is less really more?)
you,me (people in the 1660s were really self-centered)
pain,pleasure (I want to party like its 1825)
Easter bunny,Tooth Fairy (the Easter bunny needs a better pr machine)
basketball,football,baseball,soccer,hockey (soccer, now bigger than hockey)
virus,bacteria (is it due to antibiotics? In our next installment...)
bacteria,antibiotics (survey says...maybe)
naughty,nice (Santa just keeps getting busier)
What interesting stuff can you find?
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4 comments:
Apparently, it is still Constantinople, rather than Istanbul:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Istanbul%2C+Constantinople&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
"Now I ain't saying she's a golddigger ..."
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=beauty%2C+wealth&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
I'm just saying ...
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Purdue+University%2CBrigham+Young+University%2CUniversity+of+California+Irvine%2C+Ricks+College&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
Yeah, yeah. I know. Correlation does not imply causation. Nevertheless:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=fast+food%2Cobesity&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
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