Having looked through historic googlebooks many a time and been frustrated by how difficult it is to search in this time period, this chart is most certainly due to the algorithm not properly picking up the "Long S" which was an f-like character used in place of an s especially in 17th and 18th century printing.
The rules of when the short and long s's are used are somewhat complicated to modern people, but they are almost always at the beginning of words, never at the end, and if there is a double s sometimes they are combined and sometimes not:
99% of the time the word actually being used is "suck" or "sucking." It actually shows up a lot as a word used to describe babies who were still nursing. In texts from this period the word "suck" will almost always read as "fuck." This makes some of these auto-transcriptions absolutely brilliant in hindsight:
If you search for the word "fuck" in googlebooks within this time frame, you get hundreds of pages of entries like this. For example, this Shakespeare anthology:
This is not to say that people in the 18th century didn't find this hilarious, I'm sure they did, but f-bombs were not being dropped in classic literature at the time. If they do show up, like in this 1785 slang dictionary: it is almost always bleeped out:
The other 1% of the fucks in 18th century books are, of course, not bleeped out because they are in Ye Olde Porn, of which there is a surprising amount on googlebooks.
I should also note if it wasn't clear that the immense dropoff just after 1800 is when the long s stopped being used in print, and the reemergence was in the mid-late 20th century when people DID start dropping f-bombs in literature
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”
If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.
This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:
If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I'm not hearing about that, so... Tree law!
Let me be completely clear - I’m not being a sarcastic ass. I’m just realizing all over again, in real time, for myself, that reading a real life published book makes your neurons feel like they’re getting a spa day. Like I can feel my brain getting juicer and wrinklier with every page I turn. This shit is no joke, this is like hard drugs if hard drugs were good for you and made your brain feel revived and alive.
Thinking about all those youtubers and streamers who generally stayed nonpolitical as not to alienate anyone but who absolutely could not handle it when that hogwarts game came out and their progressive audiences were telling them to maybe not play/review that one and they'd throw a fat tantrum like "no you don't get it it's my job this is the biggest game of the year I can't not play it" and now we're a few months along and fucking nobody is talking about it anymore cause it wasn't even good. Was it worth it
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