All of this coincides so well with Roy Harris' Integrationist linguistics. His most essential point is that signs or concepts are not fixed but are created anew in communication. A word/concept/sign like aesthetics is newly reinvented in each new context of communication among people, either in writing or speech, but most obviously in speech. With Ngram we can trace not only the rise and fall of terms and phrases but be alerted to the point when their contexts underwent significant change in the mega-culture. Those concepts, as Kate points out, don't die out, but change. How they change is not yet clear, at least not through Ngram, but it's very good to know that a change occurred. Damn, I wish I could have 3 more lifetimes. So much to learn, so exciting. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, December 18, 2010 7:46:56 AM Subject: Re: the boring false opposition between money and art -----Original Message----- From: William Conger <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, Dec 17, 2010 11:27 pm Subject: Re: the boring false opposition between money and art I think Ngram is one of the most revolutionary research tools ever! It's really astonishing how we can use words and phrases to discover when large social attitudes and interests change. wc What we can find out is what they used to call the concepts we work with now. It's not so much as that people aren't interested in aesthetics anymore as that they changed the word-art speak doesn't appear until 1980. "modern art" appears first in 1580 as a spike and then picks up in the eighteenth century. elegance descends from the eighteenth century until now-but we still have the concept. etc. Incidentally Ngram goes until 2008. Kate Sullivan
