Eric, Thanks for the insight. I had German as well, and I'd forgotten about the essen/fressen thing. Thanks for reminding me. I'll be interest if Sara has input on this. In any case, I follow your logic, and it does make sense.
Rick Taubold www.ricktaubold.com Latest novel: Vampires Anonymous From: Eric Scoles Sent: Sunday, December 19, 2010 11:39 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Missed it! Re. the f-word, Sarah would probably be the person most suited to answer that question in detail, but my high-level contribution would be that once upon a time, it wasn't "dirty" -- just low-status. "F**k" is from an Anglo-Saxon root, which made it "common speech" (versus more cultured terms that came from latinate roots). My understanding is that the germanic cognates (e.g. "fichen" in German) aren't used the same way at all, and weren't really dirty before American culture became dominant. In German, I was taught, you typically describe an action crudely by using the animal version of the action or of the noun to which it applies. So for example, "schlies dein mund" ["shut your mouth"] would be rude, but "schlies dein maul" ["shut your mouth-of-an-animal"] would be crude. Similarly "essen" [human eating] versus "fressen" [animal eating] -- you would imply someone is eating crudely by using "fressen". English is more agglomerative, so the social rules of usage are less formalized, but commonly we denigrate someone's action by using the term used by lower-status populations. ("she cooked her up a whole mess o' taters.") I could imagine that the highly-active usage before 1800 was a time when social usage of anglo-saxon terms was still a bit more accepted; there's also a decline in the early 1700s, which I'm wondering whether might have had something to do with solidification of Hanoverian reign in Britain. (I.e., maybe in the light of conflict w/ Scotland and a desire to make Britain seem more civilized, they are de-valorizing "native" language elements like the f-word.) After 1800, England is emerging as the dominant world power, so I could imagine a shift toward propriety being very powerful. That said, there are probably also other really important factors. When do books start being printed on wood-pulp in Britain, for example? We didn't start until decades later in America (there's a point in the 1830s, if I remember rightly, where the number of archivally-available newspapers tails off dramatically, and it's because they started printing them on wood-pulp paper at about that time.) So, if the f-word was getting used in popular press, those works might not be in Google's corpus. Also also, the Google corpus might be heavily skewed toward more canonically-literary works, and that skew could be exacerbated entering the modern era: Scholars may less interested in the popular literature of 1800+, so we have a heavier bias toward more formal or academic texts in the corpus. Sarah, do you have input on this? I know it's a bit later than your usual periods of interest. On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Rick Taubold <[email protected]> wrote: I rarely chime in here, but this is a very interesting conversation and a great use of Google's tools. Now, does anyone have an explanation for the bizarre pattern of the f-word? Rick Taubold www.ricktaubold.com Latest novel: Vampires Anonymous From: Sal Armoniac Sent: Sunday, December 19, 2010 12:55 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Missed it! Look, Ma! You can do it with any word. Here's "obscene" (brought into English by Shakespeare). It enjoys no usage in the latter half of the seventeenth century, is whispered nervously in the eighteenth, gains strength in the nineteenth and totally explodes in the late twentieth! :) What, are we not finding things as obscene as before? Sally http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=obscene&year_start=1500&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 12:48 AM, Sal Armoniac <[email protected]> wrote: I was right. Here's "vaudeville." http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=vaudeville&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 12:46 AM, Sal Armoniac <[email protected]> wrote: On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Charlene Brusso <[email protected]> wrote: I wonder what the spike is for mysteries around 1630? Shakespeare's Tempest, Marlowe's Faust, the general interest in magic and theater. I guess. I don't know how these graphs work. I think they are based on the number of times the word "mystery" is used in English writing. Try it with "penny dreadful." Or "vaudeville." Sarah/Sally -cb On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 10:06 PM, SteveC <[email protected]> wrote: Obviously, you should be writing fantasy instead. http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=fantasy&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 Now, if somebody could possibly explain mystery to me: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=mystery&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 Steve -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. -- Charlene Brusso -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. -- -- eric scoles | [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
