> Commentators and intellectuals needed a new way to characterise and explain discontent. Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks the incidence of words in English-

> Commentators and intellectuals needed a new way to characterise and explain discontent. Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks the incidence of words in English-language books, shows ‘alienation’ rising spectacularly from 1958 to its height in 1974. But since then it has dropped like a stone. Why? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Alienation https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Alienation (Also incredibly popular 1650-1750... I wonder how it was being used then, I likely different) This word means a lot to me; there's little like it to describe the gulf between one's known lived reality & the various weaker eminations put down about us.