While I was playing around with the Google Ngrams viewer this weekend, I came across an interesting discovery. If you search the terms “men, women” a very interesting graph displays itself. Women are mentioned severely less than men are in Google’s databases, that is until you hit around the year 1983. From that year on, the balance (or lack thereof) begins to shift very dramatically. Not only is the word “women” mentioned more after this year, but “men” is mentioned less!  To me, this is astonishing, because if you take a look at, say, the year 1810, women are mentioned a mere 0.01 while men are almost mentioned 0.1%! This may not seem like that big of a number, but considering the amount of words that Google is referencing here, that is a pretty hefty number! Especially compared to the little amount that Women is mentioned! To me, this represents the constant war of the sexes that is going on in our world, and really makes me glad that is has shifted. Even though there is a lot of work to be done in the way of complete equality, I think that this is quite an amazing thing to have changed so radically from both directions, and have these two lines meet in the middle.

-Austin Carpentieri

P. S.-  While futzing around with the viewer, I typed in the word “google” and came across some…puzzling results. I don’t know if this is a glitch in the system or what, but I have no clue who was using the word “google” in the 1840s, or why 1950 is the peak for this word. I have no clue it really is puzzling.