{"id":1890,"date":"2009-11-13T08:53:05","date_gmt":"2009-11-13T12:53:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1890"},"modified":"2009-11-13T10:33:26","modified_gmt":"2009-11-13T14:33:26","slug":"body-loses-supreme-court-appeal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1890","title":{"rendered":"Body loses Supreme Court appeal"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning, I appealed the somebody-vs.-someone story to the Supreme Court of the United States. The decision came quickly — details are below.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A few days ago (\"Less body in your lexicon?<\/a>\", 11\/11\/2009), I gave evidence confirming that someone<\/em> and everyone<\/em> are more formal than somebody<\/em> and everybody<\/em> (because the __body \/ __ one<\/em> ratio is an order of magnitude larger in speech than in academic writing). But I also offered evidence that the __one<\/em> forms are taking over from the __body<\/em> forms, in all registers of English.<\/p>\n

Some of this evidence came from apparent-time differences in conversational transcripts, where it seems that the younger people are, the more likely they are to choose __one<\/em> forms:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And some of the evidence came from historical-time counts, for example in the BYU Time Magazine corpus:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(Note that the x-axis numbers are the first years of decade-long bins — thus the value plotted at 1940 is the value for texts published between 1940 and 1949.)<\/p>\n

Thanks to Jerry Goldman of oyez.org and Tim Stanley of justia.com, I've got a nearly-complete archive of U.S. Supreme Court opinions in html form, and I extracted the year-by-year lexical histograms for an earlier Breakfast Experiment in which I tracked the trends in SCOTUS use of sentence-initial conjunctions:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So it was just a couple of minutes' work to check on the evolution of the __body \/ __one ratio.<\/p>\n

The year-by-year ratios are quite noisy, since all of the relevant words are relatively rare in these texts, so I averaged by decade. The results since 1866 look like this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This picture is different in various ways from the Time Magazine data. The Time -body peak seems to be in the 1940-1950 decade, while the SCOTUS peak seems to be in 1916-1925. And compared to Time, SCOTUS has anomalously-low values for the somebody\/something<\/em> ratio in the 1926-1935 and 1936-1945 decades.<\/p>\n

Supreme Court opinions are not an ideal source of evidence for analyzing this phenomenon, because the number of authors is small and erratically variable, and (as in formal writing in general) the counts for these particular words are low overall. So in this case, the court's opinion may not have very wide application. Still, the SCOTUS data is consistent with a general decline, over the past few decades, in the frequency of somebody<\/em> and everybody<\/em> relative to someone<\/em> and everyone<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Thus I'm provisionally convinced that in this case, the culture as a whole (or at least its American portion) is trending fairly strongly towards the more formal member of two related pairs of words that are roughly equivalent in meaning.<\/p>\n

I can't think of another documented example of a case where the language as a whole is trending away from the vernacular rather than towards it — can you?<\/p>\n

\n

Here are the raw SCOTUS counts in tabular form:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Years<\/td>\nTotal words<\/td>\nSomebody<\/td>\nSomeone<\/td>\nEverybody<\/td>\nEveryone<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1866-1875<\/td>\n4,681,448<\/td>\n12<\/td>\n77<\/td>\n7<\/td>\n66<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1876-1885<\/td>\n6,332,333<\/td>\n12<\/td>\n41<\/td>\n23<\/td>\n64<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1886-1895<\/td>\n10,070,882<\/td>\n26<\/td>\n75<\/td>\n27<\/td>\n97<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1896-1905<\/td>\n8,605,007<\/td>\n13<\/td>\n60<\/td>\n40<\/td>\n93<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1906-1915<\/td>\n6,454,454<\/td>\n14<\/td>\n56<\/td>\n15<\/td>\n47<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1916-1925<\/td>\n4,758,703<\/td>\n12<\/td>\n16<\/td>\n16<\/td>\n22<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1926-1935<\/td>\n4,504,824<\/td>\n8<\/td>\n29<\/td>\n8<\/td>\n17<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1936-1945<\/td>\n5,552,858<\/td>\n8<\/td>\n61<\/td>\n20<\/td>\n33<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1946-1955<\/td>\n5,101,032<\/td>\n18<\/td>\n56<\/td>\n35<\/td>\n61<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1956-1965<\/td>\n6,216,798<\/td>\n40<\/td>\n128<\/td>\n25<\/td>\n79<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1966-1975<\/td>\n8,774,322<\/td>\n36<\/td>\n201<\/td>\n20<\/td>\n101<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1976-1885<\/td>\n13,106,854<\/td>\n36<\/td>\n312<\/td>\n28<\/td>\n125<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1986-1995<\/td>\n10,298,169<\/td>\n36<\/td>\n350<\/td>\n14<\/td>\n97<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1996-2005<\/td>\n7,731,353<\/td>\n15<\/td>\n344<\/td>\n18<\/td>\n122<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

You should take these numbers with a grain or two of salt, since the process of extracting text from html can be messy, and I didn't spend much time dealing with the peculiarities of this particular set of pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning, I appealed the somebody-vs.-someone story to the Supreme Court of the United States. The decision came quickly — details are below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computational-linguistics","category-linguistic-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}