Tyler Cowen has found a new game: Google’s Ngram. I decided to play it using the word “unconscious.” Consistent with what I wrote in my review of Murray Edelman, usage of the word in books in American English peaks in the 1950s.
Dec 18 2010
Even scholars well familiar with the horrors of the Great Leap Forward occasionally refuse to call Mao Zedong a murderer. Why not? Because Mao didn't know. People kept telling him that his crazy agricultural schemes were working wonders. What does he supposed to do? But the great Tacitus a...
Dec 18 2010
My wife, Rena Henderson, is a cancer survivor who follows the FDA more than most. A local lawyer, Neil Shapiro, has a regular column in our local newspaper, the Monterey Herald, and it's usually quite good. However, in his most recent column, he advocated giving the FDA more power over cosmetics. You can read his co...
Dec 18 2010
Tyler Cowen has found a new game: Google's Ngram. I decided to play it using the word "unconscious." Consistent with what I wrote in my review of Murray Edelman, usage of the word in books in American English peaks in the 1950s.
READER COMMENTS
Troy Camplin
Dec 19 2010 at 12:40am
Careful. We see the exact same pattern with “conscious.” And a not unsimilar one with “subconscious”
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=unconscious%2Csubconscious%2C+conscious&year_start=1850&year_end=2008&corpus=5&smoothing=3
Lori
Dec 19 2010 at 2:08pm
Meme campaign?
Comments are closed.