Google Ngram - an amazing time sink and a Language researcher's friend. I was thinking about Language and Technology and the term "thumb drive" (which I just noticed is the term Skydrive are using to contrast to their storage method in the data cloud). I have called them USB sticks and pen drives in the past but I wanted to know how popular 'thumb drive' had become, so I put it into Ngram viewer (google it!). I was astonished to see references from the 1800s and couldn't imagine why - after a bit of digging (click on the time periods and you get the references to the search term in all available books), I could see that it was accidental in at least the first few cases (e.g. used as in drive your thumb into: "taking your thumb, drive it..."), right up until martial arts books became the thing to read and the use of 'thumb drive' as jargon from that field emerges. Recent uses are few and far between because of the newness of the general use of the term (and all the other synonyms that are available) which means publishing turnarounds of years prevent us seeing what is happening in real-time book writing. It would be interesting (if I had the time), to see what a search on Google brought up in terms of web references as opposed to book references...
What a fab investigation resource - all of the uses are quoted in context, so you could count up references, tabulate and data-handle (see the last entry on baby names from Wait but Why that I posted), while still being able to do PEE. That would make a lush investigation if you picked an interesting phrase.
Please comment below on any interesting phrases you typed in and researched (even briefly).
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