Google Book Data Shows the Resurgence of the Geek

Google has a new tool in which you can search the books that Google has digitized for a keyword and get statistics from as far back as the 16th century. The Google Book Ngram Viewer gives you data you can use to track the popularity of ...just about anything. For example, Geeks Are Sexy looked as terms like "geek", "computer geek", and "computer hacker" to ascertain that geeks are indeed, gaining in popularity. Link

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Interesting that "United States" was popular for quite a while, but has declined in use since the 80s. "United States of America" was fairly steady in use for 100 years, but rose sharply in the 1910s. "USA" barely seemed in use at all until the Civil War, and since the 70s, the decline in the use of "United States" has been inverse to the growth in "USA".

(Been reading a lot of news articles about Congress today. Probably accounts for the word choices.)

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What an interesting tool. I put "f-ck" into the search, because I am apparently 13 years old, and it showed high usage in 1800, dwindling to nothing by 1820, then a steep increase beginning in 1960 and continuing today. Oddly, there was a brief decline in about 1980-82; wonder if that's due to the rise of Ed Meese and the Moral Majority?

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