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Sabin Muntean
Karlsruhe
Germany

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

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Post your top 5 N-grams here!

Hello TEDsters,

the N-grams are definitely a lot of fun and I have noticed that quite a few have already been posted in the talk's own thread. In order to avoid that thread becoming too confusing and in order to give this some structure I thought I'd start a conversation for you to post the N-grams you find most informative, interesting, funny etc.

I have "limited" the ammount to 5 in order to "force" you to only post the best. :)

Looking forward to some cool N-grams and even more than this to interesting discussions about the meaning hidden behind them.

Sincerely
Sabin

Related Talks:

What we learned from 5 million books

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stephane erbrech
- +1
Sep 27 2011: I'm kind of puzzled by this one, history of offensive words :

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ngrams/graph?content=fuck%2Ccrap%2Cshit%2Cbitch%2Cslut&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3

seems like a long time ago, people like very much the F word, then it stopped, and it picked up recently again...
I guess there is an explanation with the quality or diversity of the data sources. but still funny.
- Sabin Muntean 30+
  - 0
  Host Associate
  
  Sep 28 2011: Well, it definitely shows that our books have become much more vulgar lately. What I am curious about, is whether people really used the F word that much in the 19th century or whether it's some error by Google. And if that is true, then why the sudden change of heart?
  - Christie Gibson
    
    +1
    Sep 30 2011: Well, I think "s" is sometimes mistakenly picked up in google as "f", at least during the 19th century. Perhaps that accounts for it? (I mean, "suck" is not an uncommon word).
    - Kristofer Björnson 10+
      
      +2
      
      Oct 1 2011: Haha, couldn't resist commenting on this one. Your explanation is most certainly correct Christie. Look at this:
      http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ngrams/graph?content=fuck%2Csuck&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3
- ruth mcghee
  - 0
  Oct 4 2011: In the TED talk itself, he explained why you might see this phenomenon: up until the 1800s, the 's' character was written as an 'f' so any text scanned in that time period would read the 'f' word, when in fact it was actually the word 'suck'. So, it isn't an indication of heavy use of the 'f' work, but of how the digitized text is read. He showed this with the 'beft' query ever chart.

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