Avoidance tactics

Can historical events suppress use of words? Usage of the word ‘ panic ’ seems to spike down around the bank panics of 1873 and 1893, and maybe 1837 too. I’m pretty confident this is just an artifact of me plugging in a lot of words in to test out how fast the new database is and finding some random noise. There are too many reasons to list: 1857 and 1907 don’t have the pattern, the rebound in 1894 is too fast, etc. It’s only 1873 that really looks abnormal. What do you think:

But it would be really interesting if true–in my database of mostly non-newsy texts, do authors maybe shy away from using words that have too specific a meaning at the present moment? Lack of use might be interesting in all sorts of other ways, even if this one is probably just a random artifact.

In general, is there some way of finding books that use a word much less than context would suggest–and could we then ask why? That’s nearly impossible with existing electronic resources—I’ve been working on a long post about that—but it might give interesting ways of thinking about single texts we know well. This is a way massive textual statistics could help in looking at a single book. We could find out what words Thorndike avoids in his psychological texts that we’d expect to see a lot of given the broader context of early 20th century psychology—or proto-behaviorism, or name your area. Most of these would be expected, but some might not.

That’s the single-text use. On massive corpuses: If word-use shows intellectual context, lack of use might do so too. It’s sort of the textual equivalent of listening for ‘ the notes they don ’t play.’ The most obvious example might be to figure out how to grab some late-19th-century American history and look for the elision of certain slavery-related words. That’s one of the areas existing historiography has already made a lot of hay out of missing terms. Could we find areas it hasn’t?