George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words: 1800-2008
Google Books has digitized over 15 million books. Yesterday, they released an interesting tool called the Ngram Viewer, which shows how authors have historically used words since 1800. I plugged in George Carlin’s famous seven dirty words and learned that we didn’t start swearing in books till the 1960’s… apart from a brief period of popularity for “fuck” in the early 1800’s. See the full chart.
