Today's linguistics adventure: early uses of the word "blog".
I was back-browsing xkcd, as you do, and 1043 is this:
And given the...subsequent developments about Tumblr, I decided to make the equivalent graph today. I eventually found Google Trends, which I don't think is tracking exactly the same thing, but seems pretty compatible:
(And it's surprising to me, how long and how late Tumblr had more google searches than blog. I guess people stopped searching "blog" because everything was a blog?)
But before that I reached for ngram viewer, and got something interesting.
In this case, the interesting thing isn't the comparison; everything except blog is a visual flatline.
The interesting thing is, this search defaults to start from 1800. Why are there any hits at all? What's going on with that bump in the 1920s? (And a smaller one in the 1860s.)
Let's trim the ending of the series. We get this:
(Note this means that "blog" was more popular in the corpus in 1920 than in 2004, which seems rather improbable.)
Ngram viewer is drawing from the Google Books corpus, which is, you know, directly searchable. So I looked for hits for "blog" between 1900 and 1940. And the first valid-looking hit is from page 6 of that classic work of literature, Over-the-counter Brokers and Dealers Registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as of January 31, 1936:
Ah. Problem solved?
Almost! But now I wanna know what those other two, earlier bumps, are. In 1822 there's an arithmetic book that has stuff like this:
and it does seem like there are a lot more hits like that; I don't know why they're localized to the 1800s though. I think all the early bumps might be from that, though.
