Are there language trends in branding?
Google Ngram Viewer is deceptively entertaining. An "Ngram" is a statistical analysis of a "gram" (a word or phrase) to find "n" (a number). In plain terms, the Ngram Viewer lets you examine cultural change by looking at word usage in literature over time. Just type in a word and it will spit out how often that word is found in sources printed between 1500 and 2019. That's access to over 450 million words from millions of books in seconds!
With great power comes great responsibility, like time management, of which we have none. We wasted an entire afternoon plugging in words. And as you can imagine, our initial searches were pretty predictable: internet lingo ("omg" vs "lol"), philosophical quandaries ("life" vs "death") and curse words (the history of the "f" word is truly puzzling).
But then we started thinking about modern slang, specifically the buzzwords that permeate our conference rooms and email chains.
A quick internet search will show you that we're not alone in this fascination. Many people have found unique ways to capture the power of the Ngram viewer, like a script for finding the best text for new ads, an exploration of television news, or settling the debate between geeks and nerds.
So we're contributing to the Ngram hysteria. Enjoy our library of industry buzzwords!
