GoogleWriting Tools: Ngram Viewer and Define
Google has some great free tools, am I right?
We can thoroughly research the intimate practices of businesses and religions. Get the inside scoop on cults, cartels, and contract killers. With Street View, a writer can learn an unfamiliar location well enough to describe it in vivid detail.
Everything’s out there, it seems, and I do trust Google not to be evil with my search history. But sometimes, if you’re like me, you probably feel the need to enter: “Hey, if you’re listening, you do know I’m just writing a novel, yeah?” in the search box.
Anyhow, today, my character (a British military deserter in 1945) was about to utter the line: “Too bad the same can’t be said for the letter, am I right?”
For years I’ve heard “am I right?” tacked onto the end of a statement as a rhetorical call for concurrence. More so in New York than here in Tennessee, though I’ve heard it here as well.
But would my character say it?
When I have this sort of question, I turn to Google’s Ngram Viewer.
All those books that Google scans are not just turned into searchable text. They’re analyzed in other ways as well. One way is extraction of n-grams, or phrases.
The above search for the phrase “am I right” showed a steep spike in usage between 1980 and 2000. However, if you notice in the screenshot, I’ve chosen the default corpus (for my location) of English. That is a combination of American English and British English, which are also selectable independently.
Let’s separate the two into independent graphs.
If you inspect these two graphs carefully, you’ll notice the y-axis is scaled to fit the data, and the while the highest value for British English came in around 2000, it was also only .000008% of text searched. That’s less than halfway up the giraffe’s-neck curve between 1970 and 2000 for American English.