Ray Girvan pointed out in Light reading comments that a lot of the early n-grams for obscenities were artifacts of bad OCR. A little digging confirms this theory; there is a lot of (Latin) "eunt" and "sunt" and the like that Google scans in as "cunt" -- and this is so even in the 18th century. Then there are cases where a word like "mitescunt" -- written with the long s -- gets scanned in as "mite/cunt." More egregiously a lot of Latin words like "ducunt" and "dicunt" are broken up by the OCR for no reason. And then there is considerable misreading of italicized and Gothic lettering, so for instance, "Divers Presbyterian divines came also" is scanned in as "...d'vinu cunt alfi." While much of this is inevitable I don't understand why Google can't do a better job of classifying Latin texts as Latin rather than English.
Note that this is unrelated to the noise issue, which only affects pre-1650 texts
The thing is that with a lot of these words, the story that the graphs tell -- of a freewheeling past followed by Victorian repression followed by the 20th century -- is broadly consistent with what the usual picture of English literary history. But (a) how often does one really see "cunt" in 17th century writing? (b) in the age of the poem and pamphlet, literary writing perhaps constituted a smaller part by volume of the total output than it did in the age of the novel. Anyway, we report, you decide.
Showing posts with label ngrams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ngrams. Show all posts
Friday, January 14, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Melancholy noise; swiving; middlebrows
Jenny Diski writes about Google n-grams:
To see what's really going on one should run the search without smoothing:
So it's mostly just a signal-to-noise artifact that's due to small corpora. (Here's the post-1750 part expanded.) It is not credible that "fuck" was absent until the 1590s; late medievals and especially Scots -- Dunbar, Lyndsay, etc. -- were fond of the word, which for some reason was preferred in the north to "swive."
By the way, the gem-studded OED entry for "fuck" has this beautiful inadvertent alexandrine by Florio, defining "fottere" in World of Words:
(Note to self/others: use in parody of Tennyson's "Ulysses.")
Another n-gram I wanted to post, although I don't have the time to discuss it in detail, is the "brow" words:
As you can see they're all recent, not just middlebrow. All of them are coeval -- middlebrow perhaps exactly contemporary -- with T.S. Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" thesis. I suspect that the dissociation of brows had something to do with this. In particular there's a Church of Latter-Day Middlebrows that the modernists came up with, beginning with Dryden (I remember J.D. McClatchy actually calling Dryden a middlebrow) and running through Addison, Richardson, Johnson (but not Pope or Swift, who were playful and mad respectively), and Walter Scott, to the high Victorian period when the distinction between middlebrows and highbrows becomes imperceptible. This lines up nicely with Eliot's history of English poetry, in which all poetry after Milton and Dryden (until Eliot, of course) was either ethereal and goofy or businesslike and drab.
Update Jenny Davidson asks in comments about the "standard" history of highbrow, which is presumably a phrenology thing although I can't locate any reliable early sources of an explicitly phrenological character. Assuming that this is so, it's interesting that even highbrow dates from the later days of phrenology. Perhaps this is because the terms had no real, non-jocular application before the era of Bloomsbury and Eliot.
Melancholy is virtually non-existent before 1570, but begins to rise and then falls until it drops off completely around 1625, about the time of the death of Dowland. It builds again to a great surge in 1650 (when, it says in Wikipedia, ‘the Age of Discovery ends’: reason enough), falls and then picks up, growing nicely and rising with the Romantics in 1800, and then declines gently before starting to increase again after 2000. Sting recorded a very terrible version of Dowland’s songs in 2006. [Ed. !!] Fuck is quite absent from books until about 1590 when it jolts up the chart for about eight years and then plummets, before returning in the 1630s...
To see what's really going on one should run the search without smoothing:
So it's mostly just a signal-to-noise artifact that's due to small corpora. (Here's the post-1750 part expanded.) It is not credible that "fuck" was absent until the 1590s; late medievals and especially Scots -- Dunbar, Lyndsay, etc. -- were fond of the word, which for some reason was preferred in the north to "swive."
By the way, the gem-studded OED entry for "fuck" has this beautiful inadvertent alexandrine by Florio, defining "fottere" in World of Words:
to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy.
(Note to self/others: use in parody of Tennyson's "Ulysses.")
Another n-gram I wanted to post, although I don't have the time to discuss it in detail, is the "brow" words:
As you can see they're all recent, not just middlebrow. All of them are coeval -- middlebrow perhaps exactly contemporary -- with T.S. Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" thesis. I suspect that the dissociation of brows had something to do with this. In particular there's a Church of Latter-Day Middlebrows that the modernists came up with, beginning with Dryden (I remember J.D. McClatchy actually calling Dryden a middlebrow) and running through Addison, Richardson, Johnson (but not Pope or Swift, who were playful and mad respectively), and Walter Scott, to the high Victorian period when the distinction between middlebrows and highbrows becomes imperceptible. This lines up nicely with Eliot's history of English poetry, in which all poetry after Milton and Dryden (until Eliot, of course) was either ethereal and goofy or businesslike and drab.
Update Jenny Davidson asks in comments about the "standard" history of highbrow, which is presumably a phrenology thing although I can't locate any reliable early sources of an explicitly phrenological character. Assuming that this is so, it's interesting that even highbrow dates from the later days of phrenology. Perhaps this is because the terms had no real, non-jocular application before the era of Bloomsbury and Eliot.
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