You and I

I have been looking at Google Labs and their NGram viewer, which allows you to research the use of any word or phrase in the book corpora of (so far) English, French, Hebrew, Russian and Spanish from 1800 to 2000 and spot trends.

I have been playing with this and offer one example. 'You' fell from a peak of over 2 instances per 1000 printed words in 1900 to just over 1.2 per 1000 in 1965 (a 40% drop!) before rising again over the past 40 years.

Why did 'you' fall so dramatically out of favour? Why has it revived? Was 1965 a particularly selfish year? Are we now writing about others more than about ourselves?

Perhaps not. Certainly the long-term trend for 'I' is quite similar to 'you' with a peak at about 1900 and a steady decline thereafter (although since 1980 and the rise of the New Right it seems to be on the increase again). Even so, at 3.5 per 1000 it is still twice as common as 'you' and more common than any other pronoun. Our favourite subject is still ourselves.

Comments

Simon M Hunter said…
Oops, forgot to mention Chinese, which is there too.
15 March 2011 at 12:57
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rashid and Marwen

Image
In the compound where I ‘worked’ until yesterday (affectionately known as the Gulag to its inmates), Rashid is the ‘tea boy’. Aged 25 and from Mombasa, he has a degree, fluent English (he was laughing at the native speaker banter in the tea room) and is obviously as bright as a magpie’s eye. So why is he serving us coffee and wiping the tables for 1500 riyals (£250) a month? Corruption, he sighed; unless you know the right people in Kenya, or pay bribes, it’s impossible to find a job. Marwan picked us up outside the souk on Wednesday evening, driving a Toyota that he was using as an unlicensed taxi (the licensed variety are in short supply in Doha). He wanted 15 riyals for the trip back but we beat him down to 10 and got in. He was from Syria, also with a degree and very good English. His day job? A cook in a Lebanese restaurant for 850 riyals a month. So he borrows a car and drives the streets to augment his income, much of which he sends home, and works 20 hour days. After hearin...
Read more

Décadence Mandchoue

The memoir of Sir Edmund Trelawney Backhouse, 2nd Bt. (Backhouse /bækˈʌs/, which is appropriate) will be published this week , and a cracking good read it looks, even if it is a load of old cobblers. I wouldn't be so sure though. Reading the review I was reminded of my own time in China; if I published a memoir of life in Guangzhou in the mid-noughties no-one would believe it. I could tell of the divorcée who invited me to move in and offered to sweeten the deal by installing a concubine or two. The girlfriend who came over one night with her 17 year old, uninitiated, eager cousin. The unspeakably depraved practices of Mystic Meg from Hiroshima. T he policewoman who, upon discovering the effects of black resin on the male member, ensured that there was always a ready supply on the bedside table. T he millionaire's daughter who drove me to a nightclu b with one hand on the wheel of the Merc and the other not, at every traffic light her head bobbing down for a quick... As I s...
Read more