May 19, 2004

Knowledge her last reveal

As The Curmudgeonly Clerk did a bit earlier, a commenter over at Simple Bits has projected the Language Log bat signal on the low-hanging clouds of this evening's blogosphere. Geoff Pullum answered T.C.C.'s call, and is now chilling out after parking the 'Logmobile back in the 'Logcave, so I guess it's up to me to roll on this one...

Dan Cederholm at Simple Bits wrote:

Every year I’m amused by a certain catch phrase that sweeps the media. Last year it was “cold snap” — at least here in the Northeast United States.
[...]
Previous to last year I had never heard these two words used in conjunction. And this last winter it disappeared and was never uttered again. It had reached its Tipping Point, and people moved on to other ways of describing how cold the weather was.

This year, it’s “reveal”. Specifically when used as a noun. This word is everywhere, and we can blame reality television for it. Any makeover show — or one with a surprise ending will use this to describe the portion of the program that you just can’t miss.

“The big reveal is coming up… right after the break.”

I’m guessing that “reveal” has almost reached its tipping point.

Down in the 12th comment, Jacob observed:

I’ve also heard “cold snap” used all my life. I grew up in south Texas, for what it’s worth.

The use of “reveal” as a noun is mind-boggling; I don’t watch much TV besides cartoons and Japanese cooking shows, so I’ve never heard it used in that fashion. Perhaps “revelation” carries too much biblical baggage for comfort? Maybe they’ll address this over at the Language Log.

Well, in the first place, I'm with Jacob (and other commenters) who think that "cold snap" is an old standard -- and I grew up in rural eastern Connecticut. I also haven't noticed any recent peak and subsequent decline in usage. The OED says that "cold snap" is originally from the U.S., and gives a citation from T. Smith's "Jrnl." for 1776. Using Altavista's "Advanced Web Search", I get the following counts for "cold snap" within the past five six-month periods (ignoring that 2004 isn't half over yet):

1st half 2002
2nd half 2002
1st half 2003
2nd half 2003
1st half 2004
609
865
1,435
2,361
14,390

The time function of counts may not be reliable in this source -- I think the date restriction is based on file dates in a current snapshot, not samples collected at different times -- but such as it is, this evidence certainly doesn't support the view that "last winter [cold snap] disappeared and was never uttered again". As a spot check, Google's news search shows plenty of recent news items using "cold snap", such as this Chicago Sun-Times "Midwest Fishing Report" dated May 19, 2004, which tells us that

Crappie were hot last week; the weekend cold snap backed them off. Crappie should come up this week when the weather stabilizes.

[By the way, note the nice zero-affix plural form of "crappie", as appropriate for game animals, e.g. elk, deer, salmon, ...]

There are plenty of recent uses in papers from the northeastern U.S., such as the Providence Journal on May 11: "New England's power grid has concluded there was no market abuse involving a high number of shutdowns by generators using natural gas during a January cold snap"; or the Philadelphia Inquirer for May 16: "The limited supply is due to last winter's cold snap that killed off large numbers of woolly adelgid before they could be harvested to feed beetles..."

Here are comparable counts from Altavista for the phrase "big reveal" over the same time period:

1st half 2002
2nd half 2002
1st half 2003
2nd half 2003
1st half 2004
16
27
27
97
781

Comparing scaled counts, with the first half of 2002 set to a value of 1, suggests that "big reveal" is indeed booming this past year year to a larger extent than "cold snap":

 
1st half 2002
2nd half 2002
1st half 2003
2nd half 2003
1st half 2004
cold snap
1
1.42
2.36
3.88
23.6
big reveal
1
1.69
1.69
6.06
48.8

As a point of comparison for overall growth of the web page population, take the counts and scaled counts for "comparison", which has presumably not been subject to fashion or fad in either direction:

 
1st half 2002
2nd half 2002
1st half 2003
2nd half 2003
1st half 2004
counts
192,254
334,006
353,157
665,605
6,830,094
scaled counts
1
1.74
1.78
3.46
35.52

Since the scaled counts are in between "cold snap" and "big reveal", maybe the former is at least slacking off relative to expected growth rates, while the latter is growing faster than expected? So maybe Cederholm has noticed an inflection in the second derivative of the frequency of this expression? Then again, maybe he's just blowing smoke... One way or another, chalk up another instance of Layne's Law.

Of course, I'm working with a small amount of far-from-ideal evidence here -- more and better data would be needed to say anything believable about relative rates of change. Philip Resnik has been poking around in the Internet Archive, and maybe he can calibrate this better. This particular case is not very important, but a general ability to make reliable statements about changes in word and phrase frequency over time would be a Good Thing.

As for Jacob's conjecture that "reveal" is used as a nominalization in place of "revelation" in order to avoid religious overtones, -- that may well be true.

Nouning verbs by "zero derivation" is pretty common: cancel, display, gulp, skim, take, try, wail, etc..

And different nominalizations are sometimes associated with a different senses of a verb. Thus expose in one sense is connected to exposure, and in another sense to exposition. So it makes some sense to choose a new nominalization for a new nominal sense.

And believe it or not, "reveal" as a nominalization is pretty old, in fact archaic. The OED gives us:

[f. REVEAL v.]

A revealing, revelation, disclosure.

1629 WADSWORTH Pilgr. iii. 22 He vtterly disclaimed their superstitious reueales.
1646 SIR T. BROWNE Pseud. Ep. 195 In nature the concealment of secret parts is the same in both sexes and the shame of their reveale equall.
1858 BAILEY Age 41 Faith her first law, knowledge her last reveal.

Posted by Mark Liberman at May 19, 2004 08:25 PM