Got Any Duck Food?

Last week I was complaining on Facebook about a number of small issues, the kind of annoyances that are sometimes called first world problems.

Example:
The company that services our furnace had called and said we were about due and would tomorrow be convenient?  We said it would be and set up an appointment for between 10 and noon.

I cleared the space around the furnace and we made sure to be home at the scheduled time.  At 12:30 we gave up and called the company. The clerk said she had no record of an appointment.  (Let me remind you: they had called us.)  She apologized and we set up an appointment for the 16^th.

An hour later I received an email from them confirming our appointment – for the 13^th. Right time, wrong day.

And that was how our week had gone, one stupid little annoyance after another, mostly involving companies who couldn't keep their own records straight.

I acknowledged that none of these were big problems but together they felt like being nibbled to death by ducks.

Someone wrote back delighted by the phrase and I wondered if it was possible they had not heard it before. And that got me wondering: where does it come from?

Which sent me to the Ngram Viewer. I have written about this tool before which lets you harness the power of the millions of publications scanned by Google to trace the use of a word or phrase.

The earliest reference it pulled up was from an 1813 book of proverbs: "One had as good be nibbled to death, or pecked to death by a hen."  They offer no explanation but it appears to mean that one stupid fate is as bad as another.

Two ducks.  See them both?

(On the same page the author helpfully explains that "to dine with Sir Humphrey" means to go without your dinner.  Glad we got that cleared up.)

Actually, the Viewer also pulled up a comic song from 1810 which says that if a person misbehaves with women "sic a fellow desarves to be nibbled to death by ducks, as the worm said to the fisherman."

In 1865 Thomas Mozley wrote that sitting through sermons in his childhood had given him the fidgets, which felt  like "being nibbled to death by ducks, or scraped to death with oyster shells."

In 1868 Charles Sturgeon wrote a pamphlet warning trade unionists that the government was treating them like a man who tickled his rich wives to death and said that if they follow along "you will deserve not only to be tickled to death but nibbled to death by ducks."

I finally found what was clearly the correct meaning (which is to say, mine) in an engineering magazine in 1874. The writer complained of "the old, old story:" a great man with a great idea nibbled to death by ducks.

Let's jump to modern times. Laura McCullough wrote a delightful article about the life of an academic administrator. She bought a box of 100 little rubber ducks and every time her work was interrupted she moved a duck from one box to another.  It made both her and the interrupters aware of some of the obstacles to her productivity. 

My faculty took it very well and joined in with the exercise in a playful spirit. One professor brought in a nice wicker basket for the ducks to live in at the start of their day. Her children decorated my “nibbled” box with pictures of ducks and the word “nibble” scribbled all over it.

And speaking of productivity, now that I have my (ahem) ducks in a row, I'm going to write some fiction.

But one more thing: if you don't understand the title, see this.

Ngrams, or How to Be Groovy in 1864.

 Let's get a bit convoluted, shall we? Last month on the Short Mystery Fiction Society* list Judy Penz Sheluk pointed to a blog piece she wrote about a webinar Iona Whishaw gave.  Her subject was Ngrams.  According to Wikipedia "an n-gram (sometimes also called Q-gram) is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sample of text or speech."

And what the hell does that mean, you may ask. Take a look at the diagram below.  This is an ngram of Google books showing how often the terms crime fiction, detective fiction, mystery fiction, and noir fiction showed up in each year.  More accurately, it indicates what percentage of pairs of words published in a given year consists of the pair you are looking for.  So detective fiction was the most popular term until 2011 when crime fiction surpassed it.  I would have guessed that happened decades earlier.

Pretty cool?  But wait: we are just starting.  Not visible at the bottom of the screen is the fact that you can look up all the books (magazines, law codes, etc.) that contain your phrase in a given year or time period.

If you are writing historical fiction you have just acquired an amazing new tool, thanks to Sheluk and Wishaw.

 I wrote a story earlier this year set in 1967 and I used the word groovy.  So let's see how that word does in the ngram world.  The diagram below shows the word was very popular in 1967, although it peaked in 1970.

But wait - why do we see that huge jump around 2010?  A quick click on the 2009-2011 button reveals a programming language called Groovy. And sure enough, if we make the ngram case sensitive Groovy becomes briefly more popular than its lower case sibling.

But I learned something even weirder. Groovy was being used long before the flower children's parents were even born. I found this quotation from the Saturday Review, January 1864: "For a groovy parent trains a groovy child, and the groovy child must be father of a groovy man."

How hip those Victorian English dudes were, you may be saying. Alas, the anonymous writer did not mean it as a compliment. He was talking about being stuck in a rut, thinking inside the box. Very much not groovy.

I am also writing a story set in 1959 and one of the characters is socially awkward, has certain verbal tics, and can do amazing mathematical feats in his head. Today most of us amateur diagnosticians would say "he's on the autistic spectrum." But would anyone have used that term sixty years ago? We can go to ngrams again, but this reveals a weakness of the tool.

Because when I search for uses before 1960 I find publications that supposedly have that date, but were really published later.  There is a 1992 edition, for example, of a psychiatric manual which was first published in the 1950s, and Google Books can't spot the difference.  There is a similar problem with journals that were founded a long time ago.  (HathiTrust, another great free tool for historical sources, suffers from the same limitation.)

On the other hand... A few weeks ago Leigh wrote a fascinating piece here about words and concepts that started in the 1980s.  His source claimed that "eggs benedict" wasn't given that name until 1984.  Google Books Ngrams quickly found it in a  the Hotel St. Francis Cookbook, 1919 edition.

And now I'm hungry.  But before I head to the fridge, much thanks to Judy Penz Sheluk and Iona Wishaw for pointing out this cool tool.  You can play around with the Google Books ngram viewer here.

*I am the Society's current president and I hereby invite you to join.  It's free but new memberships are not accepted between January 1- May 1, so hop to it here.