Ha, I was thinking along exactly the same lines when I read that paragraph. Last week, I found myself reading a 1784 magazine article [1] about "Aerostatical E

Ha, I was thinking along exactly the same lines when I read that paragraph. Last week, I found myself reading a 1784 magazine article [1] about "Aerostatical Experiments" (the first hot air balloons) which referred to "inflammable air" which is what they called hydrogen in those days. Google n-gram viewer gives a beautiful illustration of when the name changed [2] -- this is an obvious switchover but I imagine many words change meaning and usage more slowly and in more subtle ways, so your proposal was quite exciting to think about. Let's hope someone takes up that line of research, either from the humanities side or the machine learning side. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=lvsRAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA29&ots=krFkUZKv1t&dq=principals%20of%20aerostatical%20experiments&pg=PA31#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=lvsRAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA29&ots=... [2] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=inflammable+air%2Chydrogen&year_start=1750&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cinflammable%20air%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chydrogen%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=inflammable+ai...