Linguistic dark matter

[Joel S. Berson]

At 12/17/2010 08:30 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Bad scans by Google must make up a fair number of those "dark" terms and
>undermine the authority of the graphs.
>
>A search for "crud," for example, shows that virtually all examples
>before the late thirties (allegedly) are bad scans of "cruel" and "crude."
>And that's just in English.

Am I surprised that the word Jon would search for for his example is "crud"?

Joel

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