{"id":50821,"date":"2021-04-15T10:54:46","date_gmt":"2021-04-15T15:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=50821"},"modified":"2021-04-15T14:55:24","modified_gmt":"2021-04-15T19:55:24","slug":"semantic-drift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=50821","title":{"rendered":"Semantic drift"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From <a href=\"https:\/\/thenib.com\/whos-the-man\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jen Sorensen<\/a>:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/SorensenTheMan.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/SorensenTheMan.png\" width=\"490\" title=\"Click to embiggen\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This seems accurate &#8212; but if the referents have been steadily broadening, what explains the secular decay in <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/ngrams\/graph?content=the+establishment&#038;year_start=1900&#038;year_end=2019&#038;corpus=28&#038;smoothing=3\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Google Ngram frequency of \"the establishment\"<\/a> since the end of the 1960s?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/NgramEstablishment.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/NgramEstablishment.png\" width=\"490\" title=\"Click to embiggen\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>And what was the peak in 1945?<\/p>\n<p>Update &#8212; as suggested in the comments, and as <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/ngrams\/graph?content=%28the+establishment+of+the%29%2F%28the+establishment%29&#038;year_start=1900&#038;year_end=2019&#038;corpus=28&#038;smoothing=3&#038;direct_url=t1%3B%2C%28the%20establishment%20of%20the%29%20\/%20%28the%20establishment%29%3B%2Cc0\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">this graph<\/a> below also suggests, many (if not most) instances of \"the establishment\" in the Google Books archive are irrelevant to this comic.<\/p>\n<p><iframe name=\"ngram_chart\" src=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/ngrams\/interactive_chart?content=%28the+establishment+of+the%29%2F%28the+establishment%29&#038;year_start=1900&#038;year_end=2019&#038;corpus=28&#038;smoothing=3&#038;direct_url=t1%3B%2C%28the+establishment+of+the%29+%2F+%28the+establishment%29%3B%2Cc0\" width=480 height=260 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 hspace=0 vspace=0 frameborder=0 scrolling=no><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Jen Sorensen:<\/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":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linguistics-in-the-funny-papers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50821","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=50821"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50827,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50821\/revisions\/50827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}