Learning from the Ngram

Table 1. 'Shit' and 'Fuck' in English, 1600-2008

Here is what I have discovered so far using Google's powerful new culturometric tool, the Ngram:

In books published in Russian from the Bolshevik Revolution to the Gorbachev era, references to Marx far outnumbered references to Freud and Wittgenstein, who both appear, other than a brief moment in the 1920s, more or less equal. (In the graph, Marx is blue, Freud red, and Wittgenstein green.)

In books published in Russian from 1917 to 2008, there is a spike in occurrences of the capitalized form of 'God' around the time of the fall of communism. (In the graph, 'God' is blue and 'god' is red.)

In books published in English over the past 100 years, interest in terrorists has increased sharply over the course of the most recent decade.

In books published in German in the 20th century, the preoccupation with 'authenticity' only got worse after the war. 

While Suzanne Somers' career would continue to stagnate following her departure from Three's Company, over the course of the 1990s Osama bin Laden's own star was beginning to rise.

Over the course of the 20th century, there was a steady decline in interest in heaven, but this decline has been abruptly reversed since the beginning of the present century.

Hell steadily gained ground on heaven in the 20th century, but heaven has made a strong comeback in the past decade.

Hell still enjoys a safe lead over heck, as does damn over dang, while shoot continues to make an impressive showing against shit.

The early moderns preferred fuck to shit, while the postmoderns have had it the other way 'round. In the Age of Revolution (roughly 1789 to the 1960s), both lapsed into near total desuetude.

For the first time since 1925, love is leading death by a nose!

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Comments

[edinblack]

The early moderns may not have preferred "fuck" to "shit," due to the interference of long 's,' which, due to errors in Google's OCR, gives "fuck" for many cases of "suck." The change from long 's' to short 's' took place around 1899.

See the piece about this problem at multitude.tv/content/view/471/60/

Here's the graph which includes suck; notice the flipover at 1800:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=shit,fuck,suck&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

[edinblack]

Typo! The change from long 's' to short 's' took place around 1800.

[dermer]

Plot it log base 10 occurrence vs. linear time, with the log scale going from, say, 0 to -10. That would be more illustrative.