*The F-Word

In the interest of scientific endeavour, and using google's Ngram, A pointed out to me that the word fuck reached its apex of use in the printed word in 1700, and even now, despite the rise in popularity of fuck, has only reached halfway to that peak.This corresponds to the baroque period, as A informs me, and therefore perhaps fuck and fugue in some way co-relate.

I read recently about Google's Ngram application, which searches the google books' database for frequency of words or phrases. It can also graph 2 at a time and compare them within the parameters you set. The above was done between 1600 and 2008 using a smoothing factor of 10. The longer the time period, the more useful it is have have a higher smoothing factor, the shorter the period the smaller the smoothing factor.

Try it yourself–have fun!

Thank you A for the laughs and the enlightenment, as always!

Filed under: Literature Tagged: the literary use of fuck