I almost missed it, but last week there was another article by the Wall Street Journal’s “Numbers Guy” using some input from my language research activities.
Trends in stock prices are tracked by stock indexes. The Census tracks population trends. But how do we track trends in more amorphous quantities, such as the usage rate of a certain literary device or sensibility?
For a New York Times article evaluating author Joan Didion’s claim that irony was on the wane, Andy Newman used a newspaper database…
[…]
… Mansfield found a 12% decline in frequency of the word “irony” from 2000 to 2002, a 14% fall-off in “ironic” and a 16% drop in “ironically.”
“My guess would be that decreased usage of the word ‘irony’ simply means that it has receded as a general topic for cultural debate,” Mansfield said. “So perhaps the real story here, ironically, is that the New York Times story is about eight years behind the times.”
Read all about it here.
Comments 3
Hahahahah “no self-respecting ironist actually uses the word ‘ironic,’ except, perhaps, ironically.”
Posted 10 Dec 2008 at 12:27 pm ¶Did you try Google ‘insight’ in your research?
Why is irony so popular in the Phillipines?
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=ironic%2Cirony%2Cironically&date=1%2F2008%2012m&cmpt=q
I thought perhaps its Filipino..
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&safe=off&as_qdr=all&q=ironic+site:.ph&btnG=Search&meta=
Doesn’t appear to be.
Alanis is still at the top there, unfortunately as her song seems to misrepresent irony. Not sure if that in itself is ironic.
Posted 11 Dec 2008 at 6:00 am ¶No, I don’t use Google’s “insight”, because I what I research is not search phrases, but how words are used in normal writing… so basically I get loads and loads of text from the web then run stats on it.
Posted 12 Dec 2008 at 5:21 pm ¶Post a Comment