Of Ngrammatology

By William Germano. I’ve recently discovered Google’s Ngram Viewer. If you haven’t found and played with it yet, you will. The Ngram Viewer takes a corpus of just over five million library books digitized by Google and, within that arena, instantly searches for terms or phrases you may want to explore, tabulating the frequency of their occurrences over time.
The Ngram algorithm might let you visualize, for example, 20th-century deployments  of the words nitpicker, caviller, and momus—to choose more or less at random three epithets that might be applied ungenerously to a writer on language. You may already use nitpicker in this sense. (If you have grade-school children you may have another—more visceral—sense of the word, as well.) Read more...