Two Google Tools

One of the quotes I repeatedly hear is : "being a successful writer is 3% talent and 97% not being distracted by the internet". You can substitute any other occupation for writer and  it would have the same kernel of truth.

There are always reasons to procrastinate and it seems to be Google's mission to help you find more.

Their latest tool is the books Ngram viewer, which allows you to track the occurrence of words, over time, in the large number of books that have been digitised.

I don't know how how useful it is (as opposed to being an amusing distraction). I am sure someone will do something very scholarly with it at some time. I am not that person: I merely plug in a few words and phrases and then say something like "well fancy that!"

In fact, unless you are very big and clever, it is dangerous to draw too many conclusion from the occurrence of phrases or words completely devoid of context. For example 'road running' for me has a very specific meaning - it is what this blog is about; but here you cannot separate it from a phrase such as 'the road running south was impassable due to snow'. 

Nevertheless you can still have some fun. It is interesting to see how language usage changes. For example the plot of 'running form' and 'running style' shows that in the early C20 the former was predominant only to be overtaken and then show a a late usage spurt. But why has the use of 'form picked up when it was previously in decline? I have no answer. I know why I like using it (because form=shape and I see style as being about the shape you cut when you run) but that does not answer the question. As I said the only response is "well fancy that!".

But there might be some trends that are worth investigating: The occurrence of the phrase 'marathon training' seemed to peak at the end of the 1990s, since when there has been a slight decline,  as is the case with 'shin splints' (which I use because it is mostly a running injury). I had thought the past decade has been been one of expanding interest in running but now I am not so sure. I will have to do some more research. 

Another Google toy that is interesting to play with is reading level. If you go to the advanced search and put the site address in the 'Search within a site or domain:' box and then select 'annotate results with reading levels' from the reading level box, the reading level of a site will be revealed.

This site is 21% basic, 78% intermediate 0% advanced.  I have no idea what this proves apart from the fact that I am easily distracted by such titbits of information and that Google truly is the procrastinators friend.