Google Explains the Blizzard
New York was a fortress of snow on Monday evening as I foolishly attempted to return to the city by car—expressways were covered with a slippery coating of slush, on and off ramps became a terrifying slalom course, and side streets in Brooklyn remained unplowed, walled-off behind hulking banks.
After running such gauntlets, and digging out a parking space, I was nearly convinced that the newly favored hyperbolic neologisms—snowpocalypse, snowmageddon—weren’t so silly after all. Still, do we really need such whoppers when we’ve already got blizzard, a suitability menacing and modern-sounding word, packed as it is with a pair of snappy Zs. It’s a technical term—a heap of snow (my non-technical expression) combined with winds gusting over thirty-five miles per hour and visibility reduced below a quarter mile, according to the National Weather Service. But it is also fun to toss around in conversation or in blaring headlines, as we’ve seen this week—more fun at least than its various transportation-crippling manifestations.
As we guard against the incursion of nonsense buzzwords, though, it’s useful to note that the term blizzard also emerged as a breathless media response to a snowstorm (sound familiar?) back in the eighteen-seventies, from a reporter with the Estherville, Iowa Northern Vindicator, who repurposed a term used to describe a violent blow or volley of gunfire. Within ten years, it was a solidly meteorological term throughout much of the English speaking world. (Richard J. Wild offers a wide-ranging and intriguing analysis of the word, which may have reached the upper American Midwest with the arrival of German immigrants who converted blitzartig, which relates to lightning, to its now familiar form.)
Looking back at the origins of the blizzard is as good a time as any to put to use Google Lab’s latest mad-genius invention, the Books Ngram Viewer. The program allows you to search for words or groups of words within its ever growing digital library of books, going back hundreds of years and grouped into several languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and simplified Chinese script. The viewer displays as a simple graph, providing a clear picture of when a word came into popular use, and its increasing or diminishing usage over time.
The program is a great Web rabbit hole—I’ve been playing with all kinds of words, mostly proving things I already knew—that Joycean or Nabokovian, for example, didn’t appear until after the authors became famous (though it’s notable that the latter’s use peaked in the nineteen-eighties and has since declined). We seem to have stopped referring much to the atom bomb (peak usage in the ‘fifties); nukes, meanwhile, is at an all-time high, as is weapons of mass destruction. I’m sure others will put this tool to more inventive and scholarly use, but it’s provided a day’s worth of distraction for me. My favorite comparison so far? Tracking the decline of melancholy (which ruled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), graphed against the mid-twentieth-century emergence of depression, and the steady line of regular old sadness over the years.
And what about the word of the week in the Northeast? As expected, blizzard doesn’t appear in books written in English until the eighteen-eighties, and it’s enjoyed some ups and downs over the years:
