People Don't Fart Like They Used To: More Fun with N-Grams

In playing around with N-Grams on Monday, I noticed that the use of the word ‘fart’ has declined precipitously over the last three centuries.

I was very excited about this, thinking I has just made a major discovery about the history of indigestion.

Unfortunately, digging into the data shows that this is due errors in Google’s OCR.

Clearly these are mis-readings of the word ‘part’. Though the biblical passage is arguably improved by the replacement.