"upskirting", "downblousing"

[Baker, John]

        Ah, but the noun/adjective forms are much more common.  For upskirt, Google claims to have about 5,000,000 hits; for downblouse, 445,000.

        Seeing numbers that large made me wonder what they mean, in the context of Google.  Here are a few other words for comparison:

The - 5,590,000,000
American - 146,000,000
Dialect - 838,000
Society - 76,800,000

        The number for "the" is particularly striking, since Google claims to include only 4,285,199,774 pages.  "A," in contrast, gets only 3,430,000,000 hits.

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
Of Laurence Horn
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2004 9:18 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: "upskirting", "downblousing"


New to me, but they've both been around for a few years.
"Upskirting" was profiled on ABC World News Tonight; this is the name
for the evidently popular and legal practice of video voyeurism in
which cellphone cameras are utilized to transmit photos of...well,
the word is pretty compositional, as is "downblousing".   The first
of these has, incredibly, 43,800 google hits.  (How can there be a
word with 43,800 google hits that I've been in total ignorance of?  I
know, sheltered life.  I guess it's reassuring that none of my
students have included either of these in their new word journals.)
"Downblousing" is clearly parasitic, with just 93 hits.  As is often
the case with informal coinages, the google-to-Nexis ratio is rather
high; there are just 21 Nexis cites for "upskirting" on the "Major
Papers" option, going back to 1999 (SKIRT-PEEPING VIDEO SUSPECT
BLAMES NET; PALM-SIZED CAMERA SEIZED AT CHURCH CARNIVAL, from the
Cleveland Plain Dealer) and 13 for "downblousing", with many overlaps
between the two.  Note also that the enormous google-attested
priority for "upskirting" vis-a-vis "downblousing" does not emerge on
Nexis.

Larry