google ngrams

[rjpalmer]

Google ngrams is notorious for transcrioption issues for earlier works. Refer to my previous article post on this thread with regards this problem, outlined in Wired magazine - a leading tech publictaion. Or just kep ignoring the problems with this type of tool.
https://www.wired.com/2015/10/pitfal...-google-ngram/

A nice example:

It's a fair point and I agree there are very real problems with ngrams, but isn't that why we have to use our brains?

It seems fairly obvious why the graph for "****" would look like this.

Two explanations come to mind. Typefaces were more elaborate in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Printing, meanwhile, was often of poor quality. Many of those early hits are probably OCR errors----"puck" and even "luck" are being misread by the software.

The other explanation is that it was a more licentious age and the word "****" WAS actually being used. (Rochester and some of the British satirists come to mind).

In the 19th Century, when prudery and self-censorship abounded, we no longer see the word in print very often, especially in newspapers and periodicals.

The word explodes again in the 1950s and 60s, when even journalists and certainly pulp writers start using it in articles and books.

Thus, there is a rational explanation for why the ngram looks like this.

What is your explanation for the ngram of "bumbling buffoon"?

Was it a dirty phrase that wasn't finding its way into print in an age of censorship? Or was it just not in circulation?

Since we now have the ability to search archives and confirm its use as plotted by the ngram, why are you so willing to throw out the tool?

[Yabs]

It's a fair point and I agree there are very real problems with ngrams, but isn't that why we have to use our brains?

It seems fairly obvious why the graph for "****" would look like this.

Two explanations come to mind. Typefaces were more elaborate in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Printing, meanwhile, was often of poor quality. Many of those early hits are probably OCR errors----"puck" and even "luck" are being misread by the software.

The other explanation is that it was a more licentious age and the word "****" WAS actually being used. (Rochester and some of the British satirists come to mind).

In the 19th Century, when prudery and self-censorship abounded, we no longer see the word in print very often, especially in newspapers and periodicals.

The word explodes again in the 1950s and 60s, when even journalists and certainly pulp writers start using it in articles and books.

Thus, there is a rational explanation for why the ngram looks like this.

What is your explanation for the ngram of "bumbling buffoon"?

Was it a dirty phrase that wasn't finding its way into print in an age of censorship? Or was it just not in circulation?

Since we now have the ability to search archives and confirm its use as plotted by the ngram, why are you so willing to throw out the tool?

It seems to be the word “suck” that’s triggering a lot of the earlier hits, the old long S looking very much like an F

[rjpalmer]

It seems to be the word “suck” that’s triggering a lot of the earlier hits, the old long S looking very much like an F

Yes, that makes sense.

[erobitha]

It's a fair point and I agree there are very real problems with ngrams, but isn't that why we have to use our brains?

It seems fairly obvious why the graph for "****" would look like this.

Two explanations come to mind. Typefaces were more elaborate in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Printing, meanwhile, was often of poor quality. Many of those early hits are probably OCR errors----"puck" and even "luck" are being misread by the software.

The other explanation is that it was a more licentious age and the word "****" WAS actually being used. (Rochester and some of the British satirists come to mind).

In the 19th Century, when prudery and self-censorship abounded, we no longer see the word in print very often, especially in newspapers and periodicals.

The word explodes again in the 1950s and 60s, when even journalists and certainly pulp writers start using it in articles and books.

Thus, there is a rational explanation for why the ngram looks like this.

What is your explanation for the ngram of "bumbling buffoon"?

Was it a dirty phrase that wasn't finding its way into print in an age of censorship? Or was it just not in circulation?

Since we now have the ability to search archives and confirm its use as plotted by the ngram, why are you so willing to throw out the tool?

Using the tool, as MrBarnett pointed out previously, there is enough evince to suggest 'Bungling Buffoon' existed well before 1888. 'Bumbling Buffoon' is not a giant leap, even if in minor use or mis-transcribed by the technology.

[caz]

So what is the actual argument here? That Mike Barrett would have picked up on the 'explosion' in the use of the expression 'bumbling buffoon', from his trips to the Saddle, the bookies and the local shops, as a house husband, in the late 1980s, when he had just moved to Goldie Street, and got acquainted with Tony Devereux, who was supposedly his co-forger? Or was it Mike's wife Anne, who routinely heard the expression while working as a secretary?

I mean, was everybody reading and talking about 'bumbling buffoons' by this time, to the extent that it was not just in common use, but there had been a veritable 'explosion' after the 1950s ?

I could understand this more with the 'filofax', or 'Sloane Rangers', in the 1980s, but a 'bumbling buffoon'? Really?

Are the statistics misleading people into thinking it was on everybody's lips by the late 1980s, when in real terms hardly anyone may have used this description at any time, from before the first documented example, to when the diary emerged and beyond? How many examples are there compared to millions of far more commonly used expressions in daily use in the 20th/21st centuries?

Love,

Caz
X

[rjpalmer]

Hi Caz.

I can see why someone in the UK might be hesitant to accept this. The insult 'bumbling buffoon' does appear to have been far more rare in the UK, which is apparently why you and others are willing to believe it was simply a phrase independently created by a smattering of independent wits, including James Maybrick or his contemporary hoaxing accusor.

But that suggestion isn't very credible on this side of the Atlantic. I can recall my brothers using the phrase in my youth, and there are too many examples of it in print and on television to believe it wasn't a recognizable phrase that people were simply repeating. It certainly didn't strike me as novel or unique when I first read the diary.

So maybe the phrase was picked up by someone who had been abroad?

I remember an old American girlfriend who had spent time in New Zealand using slang expressions that no one else in our clique was using.

Barrett was supposedly in the merchant marines, wasn't he?

There's no way of PROVING that "bumbling buffoon" couldn't have been an independent creation by our hoaxer, but then we'd have to swallow the notion that, 50 or 60 years later, it was independently rediscovered, and then just happened to gain popularity in the years leading up to 9 March 1992.

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

Hi Caz.

I can see why someone in the UK might be hesitant to accept this. The insult 'bumbling buffoon' does appear to have been far more rare in the UK, which is apparently why you and others are willing to believe it was simply a phrase independently created by a smattering of independent wits, including James Maybrick or his contemporary hoaxing accusor.

But that suggestion isn't very credible on this side of the Atlantic. I can recall my brothers using the phrase in my youth, and there are too many examples of it in print and on television to believe it wasn't a recognizable phrase that people were simply repeating. It certainly didn't strike me as novel or unique when I first read the diary.

So maybe the phrase was picked up by someone who had been abroad?

I remember an old American girlfriend who had spent time in New Zealand using slang expressions that no one else in our clique was using.

Barrett was supposedly in the merchant marines, wasn't he?

There's no way of PROVING that "bumbling buffoon" couldn't have been an independent creation by our hoaxer, but then we'd have to swallow the notion that, 50 or 60 years later, it was independently rediscovered, and then just happened to gain popularity in the years leading up to 9 March 1992.

Hi RJ,

I can't see the Atlantic Divide myself. I would never have flagged "bumbling buffoon" for the reason that neither word is new or variable in meaning, like , for example "gay" or "punk". It's smacks of older language, which has been proved in this current argument, they're old terms. No debate.

Likewise, your old flame who picked up localisms, well, that's essentially UK English through and through, so again, it's something of a moot point.

So it's totally plausible that "bumbling buffoon" made sense to the ears of an LVP listener. It would have, really, that's hard to deny. So why is there no record of it? Not even in an alternative context like "one off"? It's plain not there so far. "Bungling" is, and it's no mental leap to reach "bumbling", but it's not there. "Bungling" is. "B--- Buffoon" is in various forms. But not the one phrase in question. Why is that?

[rjpalmer]

"Bungling" is, and it's no mental leap to reach "bumbling", but it's not there. "Bungling" is. "B--- Buffoon" is in various forms. But not the one phrase in question. Why is that?

According to A New Dictionary on Historic Principles (Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1888) the word "bumble," in the sense of "blunder" or "flounder" was obscure at the time of its publication, which is only one year before the proposed date of the Maybrick Diary. The usage examples it gives date between 1532-1807, and the latter is a variation, "bummel'd" --evidently used by the obscure Cumberland poet, John Stagg.

I'm finding hits for "bumbling" in the British Newspaper Archive, dating to the 1880s, but nearly all of them are transcription errors for "Rumbling Bridge," with an occasional bumbling bumblebee, which I don't think is the same thing.

Setting aside "bumbling buffoon," can you give me an example of an average Victorian using the word 'bumbling' in the sense of floundering or blundering? Or is it just an assumption that it was used in that sense in Maybrick's time? Just asking--I don't yet know, but the Clarendon Press seems to suggest otherwise.

[rjpalmer]

Not that these have proved popular or convincing to the cognoscenti, but might as well toss another one up...

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

Not that these have proved popular or convincing to the cognoscenti, but might as well toss another one up...

Add some context RJ

[Joshua Rogan]

The usage examples it gives date between 1532-1807, and the latter is a variation, "bummel'd" --evidently used by the obscure Cumberland poet, John Stagg.

Not to mention Jerome K Jerome, although not until a few years later.

[rjpalmer]

Not to mention Jerome K Jerome, although not until a few years later.

Hi Joshua.

I'm not seeing it in the actual text of Jerome K Jerome's famous Three Men in a Boat. Only in a description of the book in the afterward, which was written recently. Or do you have another example in mind?

[rjpalmer]

Add some context RJ

Well, I’m still studying it, but having now examined specific examples from various 17^th, 18^th and 19^th Century texts, all the hits I am so far seeing are OCR errors for “HUMBLING.”

Examples:

“for beating down the body, or bumbling of the mind” - William Sherlock, 1688 (the original text reads ‘humbling’)

“Ah, New England, thy Father hath been Spitting in thy Face with most bumbling dispensations” - Cotton Mather, 1702 (ie., ‘humbling’)

“What a conflicting mind is mine. Every bumbling lesson is necessary.” Miss G., 1812 (again, the text reads ‘humbling’)

So that might explain the early part of the 'ngram.' They are false positives.

However, I’m seeing something different after 1925:

“What was it he was mumbling and bumbling?” -- Carl Sandburg, Potato Face, 1930.

Lecture: WISCONSIN CHEESE MAKERS ' AND THE BUMBLING BUREAUCRATS –Wisconsin Cheese Association, 1949.

“Internally it had become a clumsy bumbling organization, clotted with red tape….” - Lawyers Guild Review, 1943.


The only ‘hit’ I am seeing in the Victorian age is a false one; a story in Aunt Judy’s Magazine in 1870 refers to “bumbling barristers,” but it’s an insect parable, and the barristers in question are actual bumble-bees. It’s not used in the sense of fumbling or bungling.

Why are there no ready examples? Well, one answer is that the 1888 dictionary entry in A New Dictionary on Historic Principles is correct: the adjective 'bumbling' had become obscure.

Now here’s the most interesting part (to me):

Strange to say, among digitized books published between 1900-1925 in the Google archive, there are almost no hits for “bumbling” (yes, there are a few about bumbling bumble bees) and, of those, two fictional stories deny it’s a real word: “The Kings Men” by John Palmer (1916) and the short story “In the Green Theater” by Edwina Stanton Babcock in The Outing Magazine (1908). The relevant excerpts are reproduced below.

So, the $38,000 question. If the adjective “bumbling” was in wide or even rare circulation in the early 1900s, in the sense we are using it, why are these two authors claiming it is a make-believe, nonsensical word? How does that make sense?

Is the correct answer that we aren’t finding “bumbling buffoon” in circulation before the 1940s, because the adjective “bumbling,” in itself, was only now be re-established??

The ball is in your court, Caz, Ike, Erobitha....

[Joshua Rogan]

Hi Joshua.

I'm not seeing it in the actual text of Jerome K Jerome's famous Three Men in a Boat. Only in a description of the book in the afterward, which was written recently. Or do you have another example in mind?

It's in the title of the somewhat less famous sequel, Three Men on the Bummel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Men_on_the_Bummel

[harry]

Newspaper article Saturday,June 28,1890.