At my behest, those nice folks at Google searched every novel written in English between 1980 and 2008. I tried to get them to extend this to 2010, but they stopped at 2008. I thought about going back and asking again just a bit more loudly to make sure they understood my request. I decided not to worry about it, though, since they were so nice to me. I figgered that it would be good enough just to complain about it passive aggressively in a blog.
They counted the occurrences of a number of phrases of my choosing. I decided to look up a few popular Saturday night activities: karaoke (in blue), mud wrestling (in red), and cosmetic surgery (in green). As can be seen in the chart, karaoke overtook mud wrestling in about 1988. Yet another wonderful that happened in the 80's. It was about 2000 that karaoke took over from cosmetic surgery as the preferred was to spend a relaxing evening.
In English fiction books written in around 2007, the word "karaoke" appears 0.00007% of the time. That means that you can expect to run across the word karaoke about once 1.4 million words. To put this in perspective, the typical novel is about 100,000 words. If you read novels from 2008, you would likely run across the word "karaoke" every 14 books.
In my own novel reading, I see the word karaoke about five times a day. From that, you could conclude that I read about 70 novels a day. It doesn't leave a whole lot of time for blogging.
While I was at it, I figgered I might just as well contrast the popularity of two very popular public figures. Since I had been thinking about mud wrestling and cosmetic surgery, I naturally though of Sarah Palin. Since I am always thinking about me, I thought we should have a face off. Sarah Palin is in blue and John the Revelator is in red. As can be seen, there is no contest.
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