A few key sciences

Medicine leads strongly much above even mathematics.

WordFrequencyPlot[{"chemistry","geology","physics","mathematics","astronomy","biology",
"botany","zoology","genetics","medicine","ecology","anthropology"},"YearStart"->1950]

When something is wrong with a human

I was curious to see the vocabulary related to description of issues with human health. Excluded words like "disorder" which have too much wait form non-medical domains.

WordFrequencyPlot[{
"disease","illness","malady","sickness","syndrome","ailment",
"affliction","flu","fever","epidemic","plague","infection"}]

North, South, East, West

WordFrequencyPlot[{"north", "south", "east", "west"}, "Scaling" -> "Log"]

I was a bit surprised to see south is dominating north considering that the later is a standard and "the fundamental direction" in various geography, cartography, GIS, etc. applications and conventions. South surpassed north around 1900.

- A man who writen "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica".

 WordFrequencyPlot[{"Pythagoras", "Archimedes", "Euclid", "Fibonacci", 
      "Descartes", "Newton", "Leibniz", "Gauss", "Euler", "Fermat", 
      "Turing"}, "YearStart" -> 1800]

WordFrequencyPlot[{"Newton", "Copernicus", "Gauss", "Einstein", 
  "Hawking"}, "YearStart" -> 18

Transportation

WordFrequencyPlot[{"airplane", "car", "train", "speed"}]

MRB

Here are my initials's (MRB) occurrence since I was born. (I discovered the MRB constant in 1999 -- any connection between that and the MRB uptick in the graph after 2000?)

ClearAll@WordFrequencyPlot;

Options[WordFrequencyPlot] = {"YearStart" -> 1995, "YearEnd" -> Now, 
   "Case" -> True, "Smooth" -> 3, "Scaling" -> None, 
   "Style" -> Automatic};

WordFrequencyPlot[words_, OptionsPattern[]] := 
 With[{$data = 
    WordFrequencyData[words, 
     "TimeSeries", {OptionValue["YearStart"], OptionValue["YearEnd"]},
      IgnoreCase -> OptionValue["Case"]]}, 
  DateListPlot[
   MapThread[
    Callout, {MeanFilter[#, 
        Quantity[OptionValue["Smooth"], "Years"]] & /@ Values[$data], 
     words}], ScalingFunctions -> OptionValue["Scaling"], 
   PlotRange -> All, PlotTheme -> "Detailed", 
   PlotStyle -> OptionValue["Style"], FrameTicks -> {Automatic, None},
    ImageSize -> Large, FrameLabel -> {"YEAR", "FREQUENCY in TEXT"}]]

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRB

Is money the root of all evil?

I just wondered if money was the root of all evil. I'm not great with math, so I wasn't sure how to get the square or cube root of the values for money to see if they aligned with the value for "evil" at a certain point in history. However, "evil" is not mentioned as frequently as "money", so I don't think "money" is any root of "evil". It might be the other way around though.

WordFrequencyPlot[{"money", "evil"}]

Recession word frequency vs actual recessions

Let's plot the frequency of the word "recession".

WordFrequencyPlot[{"recession"}, "Scaling" -> "Log"]

The federal reserve bank in St. Louis keeps a set of indicators which includes the recession periods since 1854.

fred = ServiceConnect["FederalReserveEconomicData"];
usrec = fred["SeriesData", "ID" -> "USREC"];
recWord = WordFrequencyData["recession", "TimeSeries", {1854, Now}];
recLogWord = TimeSeriesMap[Log, recWord];
{min, max} = {Min[#], Max[#]} &@recLogWord["Values"];
recScaled = 
 MovingAverage[TimeSeriesMap[Rescale[#, {min, max}] &, recLogWord], 3];
DateListPlot[{recScaled, usrec}, Filling -> Axis, ImageSize -> Large, 
 FrameTicks -> {Automatic, None}, 
 PlotLegends -> {"recession word freq(Log)", "Recessions"}, 
 PlotRange -> {{DateObject[{1854}], DateObject[{2010}]}, {0, 1}}]

Political Systems

WordFrequencyPlot[{"capitalism", "nationalism", "socialism", 
"communism", "fascism", "populism"}]

Western Thinking

Somewhat related to health:

WordFrequencyPlot[{"homeopathy", "acupuncture", "chemotherapy", "fasting", "antibiotic"}]

Religion and Politics

WordFrequencyPlot[{"religion", "politics"}]

It's a common adage that discussing politics and religion won't make you any friends, especially at social gatherings such as dinner parties. But which of these terms has been mentioned more frequently over time? Not terribly surprising that the term "religion" has decreased over time, with general trends of people becoming more secular, but the fact the terms "politics" and "religion" seem to meet in our current period is somewhat telling. Karl Marx once quipped religion is the opium of the people. Perhaps politics and political discourse are shaping up to take its place, for better or worse.

The Five Ws and H

WordFrequencyPlot[{"how", "why", "what", "where", "when", "who"}]

According to Wikipedia, The Five Ws and H are questions whose answers are considered basic in information gathering or problem solving. They are often mentioned in journalism, research, and police investigations. They constitute a formula for getting the complete story on a subject. According to the principle of the Six Ws, a report can only be considered complete if it answers these questions starting with an interrogative word:

• Who was involved?
• What happened?
• Where did it take place?
• When did it take place?
• Why did that happen?
• How did it happen?

Rudyard Kipling in his "Just So Stories" (1902) writes:

I keep six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

It is quite remarkable to observe that these questions have various degrees of usage perhaps reflecting on their relevant importance, with "when" being the key question nowadays, which was not always the case. "Who" lead in past but became less prominent.

The Five Basic Senses

There are five basic senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. I remember reading somewhere that the maximal information flow human experience normally is due to the vision. The diagram below reflects on that, - note it is a logarithmic scale, - word "see" is much more frequent than others (Although it can have other meanings too, besides the direct act of vision itself, like "understand" etc. But so can other words too.). Note curious fall of "taste" below "hear" and "touch".

WordFrequencyPlot[{"see", "hear", "touch", "taste", "smell"}, "Scaling" -> "Log"]

Surprisingly, this law holds not only for the digits usage in texts, but also for the word-names of the digits, - see plots below. It would be nice to hear any explanations of this.

"One" is also an indefinite pronoun ("no one", "one of the group", "if one wishes"), so appears a lot more often in English than just as a spelled-out number. For the cases of actual numeric representation, nearly any numbered list will include one (such as this brief statement, for one); those that go to two will also include one (but not three), those that go to three will also include two (but not four), and so on.