What happened in 1725 to make the 's'-word peak in literature?
According to google ngrams, http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=****&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=0 the s-word (I would spell it out here, but it would be made into asterisks) had an anomalous peak in literary usage in 1725 amid virtually none. In all seriousness, what could have caused this peak?
2012-01-26T00:26:21Z
Used in the capitalised form, there are other uses in the same period, the little red bumps in this graph http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=****%2C+****&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=0 so unless 1725 was an exceptionally low-output year, it seems unlikely this was merely a few uses. Remember, this is .0025% of all words, one out of every 40,000 or so. Compare locally to many fairly common words, cold here: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=****%2Ccold&year_start=1723&year_end=1727&corpus=0&smoothing=0 and the use is on the same order of magnitude.
Robin2012-01-25T23:28:53Z
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You see, the words fcuk, sheet, cnut, etc. (jumbled so they don't get censored) came into usage roughly around the late 1500s but people at that time didn't know these words much and most of them never came across it in books etc. But then around 1600s when they were more known people used them freely in literature because they hadn't assumed such strong meanings. But when they did start assuming the the offensive tone, some people used them around the 1700's to get a greater effect. But after that such strong words were distasteful to the genteel public and fell out of use in literature but poorer men used it. Now they have resurfaced. What you see in the word ' shiit' is also observed in any other cussword... E.G You see, Moll Flanders and Tristram Shandy are a little too strong for the Victorians but were freely read in the 1800's.
Well for one thing, some of them are artefacts. E.g. in the Bible there's a hyphen in "make an ark of shittim wood" whatever that is,and there's an OCR error of Rob Shippen for Rob ****-ten
There are 48 volumes published in 1725 in the corpus, and in one of them the word occurs 53 times on 42 different pages. I can't find what that book is - in Google's search there are only 19 books listed and in none of them does the word occur more than twice. It's possible that the OCR has been refined since the ngram data was extracted Quote: Known issues with OCR include the old spelling for `s' which resembles a modern `f'. The s/f issue sharply decreases in prevalence in the first years of the nineteenth century.
I note in passing that the anomalous rise in use of the f-word in the 1700's is because of this, so that "A compleat body of chirurgical operations" includes the phrase "the best way is to let him f*** a young Goat" :-)
The supplementary data for the Science article has some nice description of how Google digitise books.