google ngrams

[Scott Nelson]

"The diary saga needn't even be a part of Ripper World unless you let it."


True, it has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt that this scrapbook is a hoax, and a cheap one at that, but they let it be a part of a forum discussing the Ripper case, and you may need to accept that.

The person who started this forum years ago, Stephen Ryder, did so because of the Maybrick Diary. If not for the Diary, none of us would be posting here.

[caz]

Gary -- surely you can appreciate the reasons why academics might want to find a method for objectively analyzing language, as opposed to 'feel,' which will always live under the taint of 'subjectivity'?

Dr. Kate Flint, a lecturer in Victorian literature, felt the diary's language was modern. I think she's right, of course, and apparently so do you, but one example she used in arguing for modernity was the phrase 'gathering momentum.'

Now just imagine if along came a guy named Gary, tinkering with an n-gram--or a newspaper archive--who discovered rather quickly that the phrase 'gathering momentum' was actually in fairly wide use in the Victorian era?

How well would Dr. Flint's subjective 'feel' have held up against the cold hard realities of an objective analysis?

Not very well. And I write this even though I agree with Flint's 'sense' or 'feel.'

Computers don't have feelings. At least not yet. And, of course, you yourself have spent time tinkering in the cold harsh world of newspaper archives in an attempt to trip up the 'anti-diarists.'

I get the feeling I may be walking into a trap here but - oh well, what the hell?

It was the same Dr Kate Flint, I presume, who confidently stated that the expression 'to top oneself', meaning to commit suicide by hanging, did not exist in print before 1958. Now I appreciate this had nothing to do with her subjective 'feel', but was instead a simple failure to find an earlier instance, which led her to conclude there wasn't one.

Much to RJ's chagrin, it was our very own Gary, who was 'tinkering' in another attempt to trip up the 'anti-diarists', when he happened upon the expression with this precise meaning in a newspaper dating back to the 1870s, eight decades earlier than Kate's earliest. Had Gary left well alone and not meddled, RJ would still be able to wheel out Kate and her 1958 date, and from where I'm sitting, this looks to me like the real reason why RJ is picking a fight with him. But this was no 'attempt' to trip anyone up. How narrow and self-serving must one's field of vision be to see it this way, when all Gary did was to prove that one of the go-to academics RJ and his ilk had once relied on, regarding the diary's use of language, had got their facts wrong? Why would anyone with an ounce of objectivity or integrity in their bones object to what Gary is doing, and have nothing but contempt for the practice, if it sets a bogus record straight?

Kate's mistake might or might not have had something to do with the fact that her expertise is/was in Victorian literature, not language and its evolution from that era. Was she looking in all the right places? But this is ironic in itself, given that nobody at either end of the great diary divide would appear to consider Maybrick's musings to be a work of literature, Victorian or otherwise. Could her subjective 'feel' for the language of the diary also have let her down because her field was the study of literature, of which the diary is hardly a typical example?

I always feel that academics stray from what they do best at their peril, and have only themselves to blame if a Gary comes along and shows them the error of their strays.

You know how this ends, don't you?

If Dr Kate Flint can be so wrong once, or twice...

...you can all guess the rest.

Love,

Caz
X

[rjpalmer]

It's interesting how the Ngram generator seems to work perfectly fine for the phase "Jack the Ripper" giving the exact results one would expect.

Originated in 1888 and widely appeared in print--began to be used less frequently in the 1920s--1940s--and then took off again following the centennial with the explosion of books and movies on the subject

[rjpalmer]

Then take an obvious modern phrase that originated in our lifetime--the Valley Girl insult "So Five Minute's Ago"--and again the Ngram seems to work perfectly. It originated around 1990 --took off--and is now dying off again.

[rjpalmer]

Then, take a relatively obsolete word from Shakespeare---'coxcomb'--and the results are again entirely rational. Although the word was around and used by Shakespeare, there were less books by and about Shakespeare and his fellow comical wags in print, and it didn't really explode until the Shakespeare scholarship machine kicked into motion in the 18th century.

It's now dying out again, only representing a small percentage of the many words published in our century.

[rjpalmer]

The stethoscope, invented by Rene Laënnec in 1816. Again, the results are entirely explicable.

[rjpalmer]

It is only with "bumbling buffoon," we are told, that the Ngram Viewer suddenly goes astray and becomes untrustworthy.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I’ve often been in a situation where someone uses a piece of equipment leaving me sounding really lame when I say “well it wasn’t working when I tried to use it.” Maybe this is another case of ‘selective unreliability, Roger?”

You’re just a jinx.

[Iconoclast]

It is only with "bumbling buffoon," we are told, that the Ngram Viewer suddenly goes astray and becomes untrustworthy.

Oh, I would suggest it was somewhat unreliable regarding 'freshly picked carrots', RJ. You weren't just being utterly selective there to 'prove' a point, were you?

[rjpalmer]

From t'other thread:

Find me 'freshly picked carrots' in print before 1947, Herlock, and I will be impressed because Google Ngrams says it literally sprang into existence (according to Orsam's logic) in that year.

Hello Dark Prince.

Your memory (and your logic) fails you again, Ike. Lord Orsam never had anything to do with the Google Ngrams discussion and he specifically wrote an article saying so.

What you want Herlock to believe (without evidence) is that everyone ran around saying "freshly picked carrots" all day long in the 17th and 18th Centuries even though you can't produce any evidence of this.

This non-evidence is then offered up lamely as "proof" that the Google Ngram generator and the massive, digitized archives we have are somehow faulty.

This smoke & mirrors game won't do.

Anyone who actually uses the grey matter inside their skull would know a perfectly good reason people weren't running around saying "freshly picked carrots" in the 17th and 18th Centuries. People ate seasonally back then. All carrots were more or less automatically understood to either be freshly picked (in season) or dug out of the root cellar (out of season). What you found was an advertisement slogan from the turn-of-the-Century when things changed, and it became beneficial for store owners to advertise their produce as "freshly picked."

Look to history, my friend. Expand your horizons beyond Feldman. With the rise of railroads and steam ships, the UK market--to the great detriment of local market gardeners and Irish farmers---was being swamped with cheap produce from America and even Australia. "Freshly picked" was a way to differentiate their produce from the imports, much like "organic" or "locally grown" or "grass fed" is now used as a marketing campaign for small farmers who want to differentiate their goods from the massive factory farms. With the rise of frozen foods and vegetables, "freshly picked" is also a way to signal to the customer that their product is preferable.

So it's not just "freshly picked carrots" but also "freshly picked apples" and "freshly picked tomatoes" and "freshly picked peas" that began to appear in print (in newspaper advertisements) in the early 20th Century or a little earlier.

That's all you are seeing--nothing more, nothing less.

There is no mystery about it, and it is a lame argument. The Ngrams for all of these phrases show the same pattern. And that pattern is called "EVIDENCE."

The print below will be microscopic, but all these phrases about various "freshly picked produce" follow the same pattern.

[rjpalmer]

Without putting too much effort into it, here is the earliest advertisement I can find for "freshly picked carrots" (it is also the earliest use of the phrase in ANY context I could find).

It dates to 1921.



As one can see, the Ngram shows the same timeline. It would appear that the phrase dwindled for a time during the Great Depression. Interesting.

[rjpalmer]

If you want to competently debunk the Ngram Viewer, Ike, what you'll need to do is offer evidence of a figure of speech in wide use during the 17th or 18th Century, etc., and then produce an Ngram that doesn't reflect this.

Good luck. I await the results of your research with interest.

[Iconoclast]

If you want to competently debunk the Ngram Viewer, Ike, what you'll need to do is offer evidence of a figure of speech in wide use during the 17th or 18th Century, etc., and then produce an Ngram that doesn't reflect this.

Good luck. I await the results of your research with interest.

I assume you mean 19th century, RJ?

[rjpalmer]

I assume you mean 19th century, RJ?

I mean what I wrote:

"what you'll need to do is offer evidence of a figure of speech in wide use during the 17th or 18th Century, etc., and then produce an Ngram that doesn't reflect this."

If you want to include the 19th Century in "etc" , which is perfectly fine by mean, then by all means do so, but you need not confine yourself to that century.

As for the 17th Century, we can look at the Shakespearean word "nuncle"





More research would be needed to determine why the Ngram Viewer is showing that the obsolete word 'nuncle' was in wider usage in the 18th Century than in the 17th, but I assume it had something to do with so many books and essays and newspaper articles being written about Shakespeare and his circle in the 18th Century and about the Elizabethan age in general.

The word hasn't entirely died out, except perhaps in spoken language, but one can see it is a very lower percentage in the late 20th Century.

As Gary Barnett correctly states, the Ngram Viewer is an imperfect tool, but it is a poor workman who blames his tools; it is just a general guide and one needs to supplement the results using other sources, including the OED, newspaper archives, etc. Which of course, is exactly what we've always been doing, so complaints about "Ngrams" is just smoke and mirrors.

The fact that it is an imperfect tool in no way explains your utter failure to find "one off instance" and "bumbling buffoon" in newspaper archives and digitized book archives that now contain millions upon millions of pages, including millions of pages written in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

The OED tells us that "bumbling" in the sense of "bungling" was obsolete in the 1890s and digitized archives reflect that fact. The ONLY PERSON you've been able to show was using that phrase between 1830 and 1930 is "James Maybrick," the magic linguist, in his secret diary of 1888/89.

If that sits well with you, I can offer no further assistance.

Anyway, I just dropped in to see how the Lechmereans were fairing. I'm going back to bed.

Ciao.

[caz]

Accusing Lechmere of the Buck's Row murder is no better or worse than accusing Anne or Mike Barrett of putting a 'bumbling buffoon' in the diary. Without evidence both are exercises in futility.

Why couldn't the murder have been committed by someone else, before Charles 'Cross' alerted Robert Paul?

Why couldn't the diary have been written by someone else, before Mike 'Williams' alerted Doreen Montgomery?