from the sticks-and-stones-may-break-my-bones dept.
A pair of researchers has found that word use popularity tends to oscillate over 14-year periods. In their paper published in the journal Palgrave Communications, Marcelo Montemurro, with The University of Manchester in the U.K. and Damián Zanette with the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research in Argentina describe how they analyzed data obtained from millions of books publicly available in a Google database and found a cyclical pattern of word popularity.
Most people who live very long come to see that some words fall into popularity and then out again. While some that come into existence during certain periods of time, such as "rad" or "boogie" might disappear never to be heard from again, most common nouns, the researchers found, tend to have a cyclical popularity, and that for a reason they cannot explain, it happens in 14-year periods.
To learn more about word use popularity, the researchers wrote scripts that were used to dig through almost 5 million books that have been digitized and stored in Google's Ngram database. The scripts counted every noun encountered, which allowed the users to rank them by popularity year by year. They then tracked how the rankings changed over time and that was when they found a pattern. English nouns rose in popularity and then sank again in 14-year cycles—though they note that over the past couple of centuries, the cycles have been a year or two longer. They also found that some groups of nouns, such as those that referenced royalty, tended to rise and fall together in synced cycles. And other cycles, they found, tended to be connected with worldwide events such as wars or the Olympics. They noted, too, that the results were approximately the same when analyzing nouns in books written in other languages, which, they claim, suggests a universality to their findings.
That would mean it's roughly time to remark what a bitchin' finding this is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:38AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:50AM
Has it been 14 years yet? I'll get back in my capsule.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:26AM
groovy!
My theory is that the use of new idioms is a way to build group identity among teenagers, to distinguish from the elders and the younger.
Some of these idioms get popular, the next generation needs to find others. 14 years is the time for a thing to be popular among your older brothers, dads, which makes it autouncool.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:47AM
14 years is the time for a thing to be popular among your older brothers, dads, which makes it autouncool.
While a nice theory, I'm pretty sure what they mean is that the complete cycle is 14 years, i.e., a word popular in 2000 would be most unpopular ca. 2007 and then popular again ca. 2014. (Actually, as they note, the cycles seem to have lengthened by a few years in more recent decades.)
Also, while it seems some people in the media are applying this to slang (which we tend to think of as "popular" words with cycles), the primary corpus of words they were looking at was only standard core English vocabulary (their example charts are for words like "king" and "food"). From the full study methods:
...we only kept those that had an accumulated occurrence of at least 50,000 times in the interval 1700–2008 and that had been used in every single year in that interval.
So, unless people were using words like "bitchin'" and "groovy" etc. in the year 1700, they weren't part of this study.
Full text of the study here [palgrave-journals.com], by the way.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Monday December 05 2016, @09:21PM
Could it be more like the average age difference between teachers and their pupils? If each cohort of students is taught writing by a cohort of teachers 14 or so years older, the succession of these cohorts could have an effect like this. I can even imagine a sort of comb filter, like a 14 year old student, a 28 year old schoolteacher, and a 42 year old writer at career peak, each passing their style down the chain. Obviously it's not that clean in each particular case, but what's being analyzed is the result of a very large number of cases averaged together, so we'd expect to see only common-mode signals.
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:57PM
On reflection, it's seventeen years since this video card [linustechtips.com] was advertised.
(Score: 3, Funny) by fubari on Monday December 05 2016, @06:01PM
Nice! I missed that the first time around. I like the "small print" at the bottom right: