Ultimate Word Nerd Alert

If you geek out over history, words, and making connections, then oh please do go down the rabbit hole that is the Google Ngram Viewer. In a nutshell, it allows you to find a word or phrase's frequency of use on the printed page over a period of time.  Meaning, roughly, out of every single word printed in a given year that Google can find, how many of them were "this."  You can find that the usage of  "this" peaked in the late seventeenth century.  Badass.  Or is it bad ass?  One way to find out.

Graph A: Bad Ass vs Badass 1800-2000

Graph A reveals that first came "bad ass," around 1820.  The bastardized "badass" had an early peak around 1845 but then "bad ass" properly edged out "badass" for the next century. Both terms grew in popularity in the latter-half of the twentieth century, with "badass" being the clear current winner.

Graph B: "Bad Ass" vs. "Badass 1960-2000

Upon closer inspection of  the late twentieth century in Graph B, we find that "bad ass" reignited the usage of the term, but then much like the English-speaking world itself, was bastardized by the early 1970's.  "Badass" erupted in usage around 1990, and is in no fear of being overtaken.

It's hard to believe that at this stage the Ngram viewer is the most accurate tool in the box, but it nevertheless allows the intellectually-curious to obsess all night long—or to put it another way, it lets nerds geek the hell out.   There's plenty to tweak, such as discriminating between languages, a few different versions of English, and many more.  For example, the Brits held onto the proper "bad ass" until the early 1990s whereas Americans became "badass"  just after 1970.  Furthermore, Americans use both terms on average four times more.

The hole only goes deeper...

Want proof that fiction writes the future?  English Fiction invents the "jet pack" in the 1960s, but the term takes off mostly as the "jetpack" in the 1990s.  It took until the turn of the millennium for the term to be used in general English as much as it was used in Engligh Fiction around 1970.  (Furthermore, it would seem that the idea of the jetpack is only an American concept.  The British apparently have no use for it.)

Want to talk religion?  Clearly carrots are more motivating than sticks, as Heaven is used far more than Hell.

Things only get more interesting when you compare Heaven and Hell as proper and improper nouns, or Heaven & Hell vs heaven & hell.  During the Scientific Revolution, Heaven and hell were widely discussed, and when all was said and done, mentions of either become hard to find.  We begin to discuss Heaven again when things get bad in the nineteenth century, when it seemed that every country was going through a revolution, collapse, or revolt.  We discuss them less as the world stabilized, and are only just now picking back up the conversation.

To the aforementioned curious, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and I could literally do this for days on end.  So I'll leave you now with proof that English-speaking humans are, on average, sexist pigs.

We are inherently sexist: Boy vs Girl 1500-2000

We're generally more comfortable talking about the penis until medical literature takes off in the 1800's and the vagina is closely examined. By the 1950's we figured out what we needed to, and went back to mostly talking about guy junk.