Early ADS WOTY nominations posted

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
[Ron wrote:]
> >In thinking about the coming "Words of the Year" festival, ADS-ers should
> >ponder the fate of previous choice TRUTHINESS, which appears to be
> >going the way
> >of the infamous BUSHLIPS. Here are some figures for a Google search for uses
> >in the past week:
> >
> >truthfulness 94,800 hits
> >*embeded giving 27,000 hits
> >information superhighway 26,700 hits
> >+recondite 22,500 hits
> >semblance of truth 14,800 hits
> >+otiose 7,500 hits
> >+avuncular 5,750 hits
> >*tourism suicide 6,950 hits
>
> I'll pass by the general query Ron raises here (and the
> truthiness-bashing).  But as noted, "suicide tourism" gets 460,000
> hits, almost 7 times as many as "tourism suicide", with the same
> meaning (contra my first unsophisticated suggestion yesterday).  Is
> there any reason to insist on the collocation less travelled?

Ron is apparently searching for terms first seen by Google in the past week (an
advanced search option), but is not putting quotation marks around phrases, so
that figure for "tourism suicide" is actually the number of pages that happen
to have both the words "tourism" and "suicide":

http://www.google.com/search?q=tourism+suicide&as_qdr=w

A search on either "tourism suicide" or "suicide tourism" with quotation marks
will return 0 hits on pages indexed by Google in the past week:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22tourism+suicide%22&as_qdr=w
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22suicide+tourism%22&as_qdr=w


--Ben Zimmer

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