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Araucaria · 08-15-2014, 06:24 AM

I've mentioned previously the useful google tool, Google's Ngram Viewer.

It uses scanned and OCR-ed google books, some of them quite old. Now I don't want to be too indelicate, but in virtually all of the books published in the 18th century, the "long" initial letter "s" is written in a way that makes it look like, and get OCR-ed as, a quite different consonant.

So if you try the Ngram viewer from (say) 1700 to 2000 with the two words "suck" and another similar word, you'll find an astonishing amount of profanity was being published right up to about 1810, when it vanished almost entirely, and then suddenly reappeared in the mid-twentieth century.....

08-15-2014, 06:24 AM	#23
Araucaria Bibliophile Posts: 166 Karma: 934516 Join Date: Jul 2011 Location: Cantal in the French Auvergne Device: Kindle Voyage, Kobo Libra H20, Kindle PW2, Moon Pro on Lenovo tablet	I've mentioned previously the useful google tool, Google's Ngram Viewer. It uses scanned and OCR-ed google books, some of them quite old. Now I don't want to be too indelicate, but in virtually all of the books published in the 18th century, the "long" initial letter "s" is written in a way that makes it look like, and get OCR-ed as, a quite different consonant. So if you try the Ngram viewer from (say) 1700 to 2000 with the two words "suck" and another similar word, you'll find an astonishing amount of profanity was being published right up to about 1810, when it vanished almost entirely, and then suddenly reappeared in the mid-twentieth century.....