You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

I'm Andravis Gontas.

Welcome to another episode of Inquiring Minds.

This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover,

and why it matters. If you find yourself spending a little bit more time on the internet

these days than usual, and you haven't yet discovered

Google's Ngram viewer. I highly recommend it as a way of, you know, killing a bit of time.

You use the Ngram viewer to look at the frequency of words in books. Now, this is something

that only the internet could provide for us, because until books were digitized, it would be virtually impossible

to figure out how frequent a particular word was across the entire span of all the books

written in the English language. But say if you put in a word like, oh, I don't know, pandemic,

all of a sudden you see an exponential curve that starts around the year, maybe 1990.

That's kind of interesting, isn't it?

Well, there are a lot of things that the internet can tell us about language, this fundamental human capacity.

But not only that, but the internet is changing the way we use language.

And unlike other cultural shifts, which maybe didn't leave quite so permanent a trace

or allow us so easily to track data, the internet has essentially allowed us to watch these

changes in our language in real time. Gretchen McCulloch is an internet linguist. She has a

master's in linguistics from McGill University and runs the blog All Things Linguistic,

as well as Lingthusiasm, which is a podcast for linguist enthusiasts, and she is definitely

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