Addictive toy

[firecat]

It's james_davis_nicoll's fault.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/

what's the plural of octopus?

Comments

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Oooh. Much fun.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Is that "octopuses," "octopi" and "octopodes"? I can't read from the picture, and the link takes me to something else entirely.

[firecat]

Yeah, sorry, the image was huge and I reduced it too much.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Oh, not a problem - I just wanted to make sure I was getting the joke :-).

[betonica.livejournal.com]

I think I've figured out life's woes. 'fortitude' has been steadily declining.

(Clearly, I'm going to need to dedicate hours and hours of research to this site.)

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I find it amusing that there seems to be a significant jump in the popularity of "octopi" between 1830 and 1840 which then disappears. I wonder what happened then.

It's bugging me that the Y axis seems to be unlabelled and unclear-as-to-meaning.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, the word 'archetype' seems to have suddenly shot up in popularity (and remained at the new higher level) right around 1950. That roughly coincides with the publishing of Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces," but I don't know if that's the cause or not.

[firecat]

I'd guess it was caused by a general upsurge of interest in Jungian archetypes, which Campbell shared.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_campbell#Psychology_and_anthropology