Sunday, December 19, 2010

Well, Bob, the Times They Have a Changed

Winter Sunday mornings aren't what they used to be.

We used to wake up slow, only reluctantly leaving behind the warmth of our bed for the warmth of the couch in order to curl up and watch CBS Sunday Morning. The pace of the show lends itself perfectly to calm, quiet, winter mornings.

We don't watch it much anymore. We also don't curl up on the couch much in the mornings anymore. We certainly don't wake up slow. Heck, the only thing left from those Sunday mornings is the reluctance to get out of bed.

Despite the hectic nature of our current mornings, Mini-Me, The Wubster, and Mickey (TKNTD) were entertained enough today that I was able to turn on CBS Sunday Morning. It wasn't exactly the same, but it sure was nice visiting with an old friend I don't hang out with often enough.

What does this have to do with the WordADay December challenge? One of the segments this morning was about Google's Ngram Viewer. According to John Blackstone, "The search giant has digitally copied 5.2 million books published since 1500. From those, they have built a database of 500 billion words . . . and made it available for all to search."

That's pretty gnarly!

Speaking of gnarly, this word has a ton of definitions. Traditionally, it means "knotty" or "twisted," which leads to it also meaning "unpleasant" or "disgusting." More recently, the term has been used to mean "remarkable" or "outstanding." But how often has the word been used over the past 500 or so years? To the Ngram!



This may rank amongst the top methods of procrastinating via the Internet ever!

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