Google Ngrams
Dec. 18th, 2010 07:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tahnanFar and away the year's best way to spend way too much time on something, especially if you're at all like me: the Google Ngram search, which you've probably heard of already. I'm hoping to post some of the fascinating things I've found, unless I just save them all for a 2012 Mystery Hunt puzzle—though for a taste (note case-sensitivity):
Anyway, I idly compared "know the" and "wondered the", and found that comparatively the latter just looks like a flat line at zero, but on its own there are definite hits for it. (Background: my dissertation seeks to explain why "I wondered the time" isn't a legitimate sentence of English.) So I looked at the Google Books results, figuring they'd be all either across phrase boundaries or instances of "I wondered the same thing", or possibly just linguistics papers.
The second hit intrigued me, though, because it was clearly a linguistics paper, and contained phrases like "Stratford wondered the time line", without the expected this-isn't-any-good asterisk in front of it—all the more so because that didn't seem like a grammatical sentence to me. So I looked at the book—a collection of papers that, in fact, I'd seen before—and found that that section asserted that "wondered the" could be found on Google, with that as an example. "Though probably not grammatically", I thought, and checked the footnote.
The footnote observed that "wondered the same thing" was probably not a concealed question, and that "the examples...might not be genuinely acceptable"...both observations credited to me. Which was odd, because I didn't really recognize the author's name, but when I Googled "Stratford wondered the time line", I got not only the original instance of it but also the URL that I should have seen in the footnote, i.e. the blog post of the author's that I'd commented on. (I think that, when I previously looked at the book, I was too busy noting other things I'd searched for to notice that I was mentioned in a footnote in that paper. I'd've mentioned it if I'd noticed it, wouldn't I?)
Seriously, how did any serious research ever get done before this kind of instant global communication?
- Have you any vs. Do you have any
- War on Crime, War on Drugs, War on Terror
- Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Anyway, I idly compared "know the" and "wondered the", and found that comparatively the latter just looks like a flat line at zero, but on its own there are definite hits for it. (Background: my dissertation seeks to explain why "I wondered the time" isn't a legitimate sentence of English.) So I looked at the Google Books results, figuring they'd be all either across phrase boundaries or instances of "I wondered the same thing", or possibly just linguistics papers.
The second hit intrigued me, though, because it was clearly a linguistics paper, and contained phrases like "Stratford wondered the time line", without the expected this-isn't-any-good asterisk in front of it—all the more so because that didn't seem like a grammatical sentence to me. So I looked at the book—a collection of papers that, in fact, I'd seen before—and found that that section asserted that "wondered the" could be found on Google, with that as an example. "Though probably not grammatically", I thought, and checked the footnote.
The footnote observed that "wondered the same thing" was probably not a concealed question, and that "the examples...might not be genuinely acceptable"...both observations credited to me. Which was odd, because I didn't really recognize the author's name, but when I Googled "Stratford wondered the time line", I got not only the original instance of it but also the URL that I should have seen in the footnote, i.e. the blog post of the author's that I'd commented on. (I think that, when I previously looked at the book, I was too busy noting other things I'd searched for to notice that I was mentioned in a footnote in that paper. I'd've mentioned it if I'd noticed it, wouldn't I?)
Seriously, how did any serious research ever get done before this kind of instant global communication?
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Date: 2010-12-18 10:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-19 05:26 am (UTC)