Ngram and the Blooming, Buzzing Confusion of American Life

Google's tool for tracking how often terms appeared in books from 1800-2022 can tell us much about our successive zeitgeists.

Google’s Ngram usefully graphs how often terms are used in books since 1800. For example:

The term “white flight” is used four times as often as a percentage of all words in American books in the early 2020s as in the early 1990s. And in the early 2020s, “white flight” appears three times as often as “black crime,” even though you might think they are inextricably linked.

Let’s add “gentrification” to the pair:

Wow, the obsession of American book authors with “gentrification” beginning in 2014 is weird, considering how little of it has actually happened outside of New York City and Washington D.C., and how it pretty much stopped happening on May 25, 2020.

And then there is:

Paywall here: nine more graphs below.