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?
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