El Bloggo Torcido - Twisted Oak Winery

I can't take your case! It's too sensitive!

The other day I was playing around with a new Google thing called Ngram - where you can search all of the words in the 5 million books they have scanned and put online.

 

My friend Tom pointed out to me that the search is case sensitive - he pointed out that "Bourbon" gives a different result than "bourbon". Of course, "Bourbon" will give you all sorts of references to both booze and boozed up monarchs.

 

So, how about "wine" and "Wine"?

 

As you can see, something profound happened in the mid-1700's. Wine went from being "Wine" to instead being just plain "wine". The graph shows such a profound switch I wonder what happened? Maybe Ben Franklin had something to do with it?

 

What's your theory?

Here's a Festivus Carol that just popped into my head...

By all means, suggest improvements or new (Co)stanzas!

Festivus is Here (sung to the tune of "Christmas Time is Here," from "A Charlie Brown Christmas")

Festivus is here

Miracles and jeers

Raise the pole and curse the cold

This lousy time of year

Family in your hair

Grouches everywhere

Drunken times and cheap red wines

And grievances to air

Here is Festivus

For the rest of us

Feats of strength to any length

And acrimonious**

Festivus is here

We'll be downing beers

Oh, that we might never see

A Festivus next year...

**Hey, I worked hard for that one!

Fun With Google and Graphs!

Google has a new feature called "Ngram", in which you can "Search Lots of Books" for the frequency of words, and plot that relative frequency over time.

So I naturally applied some wine words to it to see what happens. In this graph several kinds of booze - er... I mean, popular alcoholic beverages - are plotted. Notice the clear winner! Also notice that wine writing (at least, book writing) really bottomed out in the 1980's, but is now making a strong comeback. (I'm also a bit disappointed by bourbon's performance...)

What else do you think we can infer from this graph?

(I'll be playing with this some more - stay tuned!)