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I'm not sure I would take their work at face-value. These studies of word frequencies over time are often too atomized in their failure to consider the relation

I'm not sure I would take their work at face-value. These studies of word frequencies over time are often too atomized in their failure to consider the relationships between words at all. And of course, such a change in speech patterns doesn't have to actually speak to a decline in rationality but to a stronger focus on the author of a claim. The rational process of thinking might be as prevalent nowadays, it's just differently worded.

moate 5y ago
The idea that the meaning of words changes along with the frequency of their usage seems pretty important to linguistic studies. For example, it's not hard to imagine data like this being used to say that the there is "less cultural interest in political correctness due to it's declining usage in discourse" while not factoring in that "woke" has largely replaced it in the frequency of usage while often representing the same concept in the speaker's mind. The way language and speech change is extremely complex, and I feel like an analysis that uses that time span starts to become almost worthless as anything other than a trivia fact. "People speak differently than they did 20, 50, or 100 years ago" was already pretty well understood, and the assumption that these words have inherent, immutable meaning is misrepresenting what words actually are, stand-ins and generalizations limited by the speaker's understanding of them and the audience they're spoken to.