1800 was the year ... :)
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=tits%2Cboobs%2Cbr...
Google Books Ngram of George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words
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Re: Google Books Ngram of George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words
#12Interesting to see how shit and piss diverged after WWII. I wonder what propelled shit's cultural ascent.
(http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=shit,piss&yea...)
Re: Google Books Ngram of George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words
#13Does anyone else have a really hard time telling the difference between the green that's used for 'fuck', and the green that's used for 'tits'?
I don't think I'm suddenly going colour-blind but it strikes me as odd that google would pick two colours that are so close to each other for a graph that needs so few separate colours...
Re: Google Books Ngram of George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words
#14Many false positives in early years due to 's' being written like 'f' and mistaken by the OCR software. Both the short and tall forms were used, but there seemed to have been some style preferences that led to the tall 's' being used at the beginning of a word, and small 's' at the end. In handwriting or italic, the tall 's' was rather like the integral symbol, but when setting serifed font it looks pretty much like…
Andrew West provides an excellent (and detailed) list of the rules for using "long s" (as well as some Ngram graphs) at http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.html .
Thank you, this is a great overview.
Re: Google Books Ngram of George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words
#15Many false positives in early years due to 's' being written like 'f' and mistaken by the OCR software. Both the short and tall forms were used, but there seemed to have been some style preferences that led to the tall 's' being used at the beginning of a word, and small 's' at the end. In handwriting or italic, the tall 's' was rather like the integral symbol, but when setting serifed font it looks pretty much like…
Just one example of why people need to be careful using this data. It's a very useful source, but I've been seeing a lot of uncritical uses cropping up. For example, some people are using it to track intellectual trends--- compare the graphs of Heidegger and Russell or so on. This can sometimes work, but depends heavily on: 1) uniqueness of names; and 2) the particular set of books included in Google's corpus (especially if comparing people not from the same exact area, like a scientist versus an artist).
Even with relatively unique names, it can be tricky. The case of completely or almost completely unique last names (like "Nietzsche") is easy, but with the available interface to the data, it's difficult to handle cases where First+Last is unique, but last alone isn't. You need to count things like "First Last" and "Last, First", plus variants like "First M. Last", without double-counting.
Re: Google Books Ngram of George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Multiple meanings for 'tits' are also a consideration. (Maybe my monitor or eyes suck, but I had to do a tits vs fuck only ngram search to see that the big spike is in fact tits.)
I think either your monitor or your eyes must in fact fu- I mean suck, because the big bulge (it's not exactly a spike) is for "fuck", not for "tits". (And most of it does in fact seem to be for wrongly-OCRed "suck", unsurprisingly.)
Note the long-s discussion earlier in this submission.
Maybe life just really fucked back then.