The headline you never thought you'd see: Google, Peter Pan, Milton and Miley Cyrus
It’s old news that the word ‘twerk’ entered Oxford Dictionaries Online this week, but in spite of what the self-professed Queen of the Twerkers, Miley Cyrus, might think, the word’s actually been around since the afro beats of the 1970s. At least.
A few days ago my husband introduced me to Google’s Ngram Viewer, a graphing tool which allows users to visualise the rise and fall of particular keywords and phrases across over 5 million books and 500 years (up to 2008).
Ok, so I’m not all that quick off the mark – the tool was launched in 2010 – but I’ve become more than a little addicted to it ever since.
Many years ago a teacher told me that J. M. Barrie had created the name ‘Wendy’ when writing his famous play (later novel) 'Peter Pan'. The story went that Barrie had known a little girl, Margaret, who adored him. Unable to pronounce her ‘r’s correctly, she affectionately called him her ‘fwendy’ (as opposed to ‘friendy’). When Margaret died, at a very young age, Barrie kept her memory alive by naming the caring and loyal female protagonist of his magical tale 'Wendy Darling'.
In later life I have discovered that whilst J. M. Barrie no doubt had a lot to do with the popularity of the name Wendy in the years that followed the creation of his character, it’s unlikely that he actually invented it. The likelihood is that Wendy is a derivative of one or more Welsh names, Gwendolyn and Gwynedd being but two. In fact, birth records tell us that Barrie’s Wendy emerged at a time when ancient Welsh names were becoming increasingly popular.
The fact remains, however, that in the years following the introduction of Barrie’s Wendy, the incidences of the name in print increased. And this is where Google’s Ngram Viewer comes into play. As you can see from this graph, there is a small peak in usage in 1912, a year after the release of Barrie’s famous novel. Another increase in usage occurs in the early 1950s, around the time of the release of Walt Disney’s Peter Pan movie. A high in the mid 1980s is interesting to observe, but how much this has to do with the explosion of the Wendy’s fast food chain into popular culture, who can tell?
The real point of this post is that as fun as the Ngram Viewer is to play around with (the name ‘Emma’ really peaked in the late 30s, for example) it can show us a lot about the history of language. The term ‘golliwog’, for instance, once widely used by the likes of Enid Blyton and Robertson’s preserves, has witnessed a sharp, and understandable, decline in use since the mid '80s, when its pervasive use as a racial slur became apparent.
The Ngram Viewer can also, as the Wendy Darling story demonstrates, act as a marker for the introduction of new words, as well as showing cycles of popularity, often related to book and cinematic releases. Today's prevalent celebrity culture will no doubt make its mark on the charts in years to come.
And as for the extensive list of words John Milton introduced with the publication of Paradise Lost and the like – debauchery, pandemonium, earthshaking, irresponsible, undesirable, unconvincing – not only can their increase in usage be witnessed from his presence on this earth onwards (1600s), but it’s almost as if he was inventing a vocabulary to describe one young (not so much a lady) of today: Ms Miley Cyrus.
