Half a trillion words ... plus two

The ever enquiring young mind of Julie Heyward can always be relied upon for penetration to the philosophical heart of any issue without fear, favour or delay. In the case of Google's Ngram viewer and datasets, for example, she maintains this reputation with a comment heroically posted early on Christmas Day:

“How long can it take to run "chicken boogers" through that thing? Surely that was your first and most urgent task, on realizing the power of such linguistic machinery?”

... a question which subtly refines Edmund Burke's demand, in 1770, to know “where were the boogers?” Such serious enquiry deserves serious reply, so I immediately applied myself to the task.

The immediate headline answer is ... it took mere milliseconds to establish that the bigram "chicken boogers" seems, between 1500 and 2008 CE, to have appeared ... approximately ... zero times.

Undeterred, I tried the separate words. Boogers seem to first appear in print, as noted above, in the late 18th century. Chickens are immortalised in ink from almost two hundred year earlier, with a 1586 culinary reference from John Trusler – and Sir Philip Sidney, no less, was moved in 1599 to pen the words “O Mopsa my beloved chicken, here am I thine owne father...” (about which, perhaps, the least said the better).

Tracking both words across the same periods of time, chickens appear far more often (by roughly three orders of magnitude) than boogers, which makes a comparative graph on the same axes somewhat unenlightening. Rescaling and using two separate y axes, however, permits the illustration shown here (double click the graphic for a full size view in a separate window) which shows that there is an approximate correlation over most of the past century ... but that in the past decade chickens continue to increase their popularity while that of boogers may (only time will tell) have started to decline.

I am grateful to Ms Heyward for bringing this important and previously overlooked research issue to my attention.

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• Edward Burke, in The Annual register, or a view of the history, politics and literature of the year. 1771, London: J. Dodsley.
• John Trusler, The London Adviser and Guide: containing every instruction ... necessary to persons living in London, and coming to reside there ... together with an abstract of all those laws which regard their protection against the frauds ... to which they are there liable. 1586, London.
• Sir Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. 1599, Edinburgh: printed by Robert Walde-graue.