The same problems bedevil the claim that we moderns reveal our essence in words we use more rather than less. Jean Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Brittany Gentile note that personalized and unique are up. Yes, but they replace words that once covered the same ground. Made to order has plummeted since the forties as personalized became more au courant, while unique picked up the ball from once-popular singular and ran with it. Discipline and dependability are up, and reveal us as focused on economic production and exchange? Dramatic notion, but what about how people a century ago were using steadfast even more than we use dependable now?
It’s hardly that the thesis that Americans think differently than they did a hundred years ago is mistaken—what would be unusual is if Americans did not. For example, it certainly means something that I come first is now a set phrase, of a kind that it is difficult to imagine a gaslight-era equivalent for.
However, the faddish attempt to apply the Big Data approach to social psychology via Google’s Ngram viewer tool will shed much less light on these matters than many expect. In any language, concepts are expressed by several words and phrases at any given time, all of which morph eternally with the passage of time.
” David Brooks’ Favorite New Theory of Language Is Wrong. An excellent corrective by John McWhorter.
A Royal Mail bus with armed guards heads out from Razmak to Jandola, April 1946.
Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams, National Geographic
Happy Birthday, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!
Doyle, a Scottish physician and writer, is best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, one of crime fiction’s most beloved characters.
Holmes—and his intrepid sidekick Watson—first appeared in A Study in Scarlet, published in the 1886 Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Holmes was partially modeled after Joseph Bell, Doyle’s former university professor. Doyle wrote to Bell, “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes… [R]ound the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man.”
In December of 1893, Doyle resolved to concentrate on what he considered his more important work—his historical novels. He had Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunge to their (ostensible) deaths in “The Final Problem.” Public outcry demanded that he revive his much loved sleuth. He did so in 1901’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, first published in Strand Magazine. He set the novel before the “The Final Problem.” Holmes was officially revived in 1903’s “The Adventure of the Empty House, ” in which he explains Moriarty’s death and his own miraculous survival.
Pictured: 1) a 1901 publicity poster announcing the publication of Hound of the Baskervilles. It was illustrated by Albert Morrow. 2) Front cover of the original publisher’s binding, designed by Alfred Garth Jones. It sports a silhouette of a hound, printed in black amidst red cloth and gold accents.
The MOOCman cometh
Picasso, 1953
Bramantino, The Risen Christ, described here
Children attendants gather supplies for an Arab diner in Algeria, February 1928.
Photograph by Jules Gervais Courtellemont, National Geographic
Many more here.
On May 17, 1792, the New York Stock Exchange was formed. Pictured here are two stock certificates, which can be found in the Newberry collections. The first is for three shares of the Pullman Palace Car Company. The certificate sports illustrations of St. Pancras Station in London and the Pullman Car Works in Detroit. The second certificate, also for Pullman, is equal to one hundred shares. It has an engraving of George M. Pullman.
Parisians walk on the street past lottery and vermouth advertisements in 1935.
Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams, National Geographic
Fifty-two stories high, city noises fade and vistas expand. Chicago, June 1967.
Photograph by James L. Stanfield, National Geographic
