One of Google’s new apps, the Ngram Viewer, promises hours of study, play, and debate. It basically provides a graphical representation of the commonality of words throughout the history of published books (that Google has access to). Uncertain of the app’s algorithm, we at Juggernaut dove headfirst into some research of our own and came up with some fascinating results.

What we found was that, in general, themes relating to big ideas such as justice, liberty, and virtue followed a path that peaked in the latter half of the 18th century and declined ever since:

Meanwhile, themes related to social and more immediate concepts such as politics, conflict, and sex all steadily rose in commonality from the early 1700s to this century.

Make of it what you will, but certainly have fun with the tool yourself at http://books.google.com/ngrams.