Language Trainers Blog

Google’s NGram Viewer allows anybody to create quick graphs showing word and phrase frequencies in books going back to 1800. The tool searches a database of words from over 5 million  books, and you can filter for American English, British English, English fiction, Chinese, French, German, and Russian.

Although it has its restrictions, such as not giving us accurate information about spoken usage, it’s a great analysis tool. One of the Wall Street Journal’s blogs did a Christmas analysis to see whether the PC phrase ‘Happy Holidays’ has infiltrated the world of books. A quick graph generation later, and it seems that ‘Merry Christmas’ is still way out in front. It also seems that around 1900, people started capitalising the ‘merry’.

When I filtered for British English only, it seems that ‘Happy Holidays’ is almost never used. The tool is case sensitive, though, so there has been some use of ‘happy holidays’, but these could have been in more general sentences, rather than as a greeting. In British English, ‘h/Happy Christmas’ is much more common than in American English, and ‘happy Christmas’ was almost as popular as ‘Merry Christmas’ at a few points in time. It seems that the use of ‘happy Christmas’ is on the decline recently, though.

In other Christmas-related news, while Father Christmas and Santa Claus are about equally popular in British literature (and both much more popular than the Easter Bunny), American literature uses Santa Claus almost exclusively (with Father Christmas being about as common as the Easter Bunny).

A few days ago I stumbled across a Christmas-themed quiz about misheard Christmas carol lyrics. I usually start listening to Christmas music (everything from choral to Mariah Carey to Run DMC) as soon as December starts, so I thought I’d give the quiz a go.

Some of the Christmas mondegreens were pretty entertaining, but I got stalled on one which I didn’t actually know the answer to: Troll the agents you’ll tie Carol…

After realising I didn’t know the first word to the line (the rest being ‘the ancient yuletide carol’), I guessed at toll (bells are quite Christmassy after all).

It turns out that the word is actually troll. Not the ugly guys who live under fairytale bridges, or the flourescent-haired naked ’80s toys, or a pesky internet lurker, of course. Back in times of yore, to troll meant ‘to sing or utter in a full, rolling voice’ and also ‘to sing in the manner of a round or catch’. Makes sense. There’s even another blog post about it (including some more explanation about Deck the Halls).

Since a lot of Christmas carols are traditional (meaning old), I guess we don’t think too hard about their meanings these days. I do find it fun to learn new (old) words, though, and am quite pleased to say that I knew what all the other correct lyrics were. Also, Dawn we now our day of peril is my new favourite mondegreen.