Creeps from the deeps
Image: Jeff Kubina via Flickr (licence)
Perhaps you are familiar with a common horror movie device – it’s the opposite of the ‘sudden surprise’ that startles the audience and the protagonist at the same time.
This is the one where the monster/tidal wave/giant squid looms up behind the protagonist to reveal its vast immensity to the audience before the protagonist turns around to be devoured/drowned/ingested.
I sometimes feel this way about Google.
It seems that whenever I turn around, Google has developed another method or application with massive, world-historical implications that we are nowhere near close to appreciating fully.
I remember some years ago when Google commenced its seemingly unachievable task of scanning the text of just about every book ever published … ever! Now I discover that they have developed something to make immediate use of that vast database called the Ngram Viewer, which makes it possible to search the frequency of usage of a word or phrase over a 200-year period in a variety of languages. It’s a popularity contest for words.
Now it may not seem like a big deal that I can identify when ‘amongst’ really started to go the way of the Ford Edsel, but as a tool for measuring the subtle currents of thought as they ebb and flow across time, this Ngram thingummy looks like the linguistic equivalent of the fossil record – and at the click of a button too.
It’s an impressive tool at first glance, but I’ve got the feeling there’s an ominous, more mysterious Leviathan taking shape beneath the surface. I start to wonder about that terrifying calculating power being applied to patient records, credit histories and Google Maps to create a nexus that will allow a horde of salesmen to descend upon me.
That slightly paranoid caveat aside, the Ngram Viewer will offer you many diverting minutes excavating a few layers in the evolution of language.
