Improving databases and Book of Mormon phrases

[champatsch]

Some people are interested in comparing rates of use of various Book of Mormon phrases. We have grown accustomed to using the Google Books Ngram Viewer, and accepting what we see there as accurately portraying the popularity of phrases. Many Book of Mormon phrases have appeared to be strongly popular in the early 19c but not before. Recently, Gale's ECCO database has undergone some valuable upgrades. With this in mind, consider the following Ngram Viewer chart for "demands of justice":

This tells us that the phrase "demands of justice" grew from nothing in the early 1700s, to popular in the early 1800s.

But here is an ECCO chart that gives a different picture for the 1700s:

ECCO is a better and more reliable 18c database, with 180,000 titles. From this we find that there was usage of the phrase in the early 1700s, absent from the Ngram Viewer chart, and that the growth in popularity over time, though present, is muted, compared with the Ngram Viewer chart, which skews data much more by counting all instances of a phrase. So, if an author used the phrase multiple times in a single work, then that increases the value in the Ngram Viewer, but not in ECCO's popularity chart. Multiple instances in a single work are filtered out in the popularity chart. (In both cases rates are shown. In the Ngram Viewer occurrences are divided by the number of words, in ECCO's popularity chart occurrences are divided by the number of books.)

Even this, however, doesn't give us a true picture of things. Many books ran through multiple editions. If a phrase is in any such book, it will be represented repeatedly in databases and charts, skewing results. The later one goes, the greater the potential for duplicated language, multiple times. (And sometimes much earlier books occur in 18c and 19c editions.) So the upward trends we see in the databases and in the above ECCO chart are actually not as strong as they appear. If there is no discernible trend in the popularity chart, as in the case of "first parents", then the use of the phrase probably diminished over time.

Also, since "demands of justice" is a highly contextual phrase, occurring mainly in religious texts. we need to be aware that the weighting of religious texts in databases varies by year and decade. It would be quite hard to achieve a fair weighting for contextual searches, and would require months or years of work.  Those who perform these sorts of searches should take these realities into account.

That is one reason why lightly contextual syntax is much more reliable for determining the character of Book of Mormon language. The weighting is fairer and more reliable. The other reason — very valuable for authorship determination — is that syntax is mostly subconsciously produced.

For example, the Book of Mormon has a lot of causative syntax, about 250 instances of it. And about 55% of it has finite complementation — e.g. "caused that he (should) ..." (6×) — totally different from the King James Bible, which is 99% infinitival — e.g. "caused him to ..." (7×; once in the Book of Mormon).  Heavier finite complementation is characteristic of Early Modern English (but not up to Book of Mormon levels). We can check this sort of thing for the beginning of the modern period in an ECCO popularity chart and see that there was no heavy finite complementation after the verb cause throughout the 1700s. Indeed, there was hardly any. (Of course finite examples can be found in the databases, but usage rates are exceedingly low.)

We conclude from this that the distinctive patterns of use we find in the Book of Mormon almost certainly didn't emanate from Joseph Smith's own language.  Ten or so pseudo-biblical texts support this view.  These authors didn't generalize from the Bible's three cases of finite cause syntax (out of 300) and produce 50% finite complementation. In fact, there is no finite complementation in their writings. Heavy finite complementation — which ran counter to their infinitival native-speaker competence — didn't happen for any of these authors.

 

Edited May 23, 2018 by champatsch

[Robert F. Smith]

Thanks for the new info, Stan.

Have you found so far that ECCO removes much of the confusion stemming from the former notion that very late phrases were set over against early ones, so that it was not at all clear that the BofM could certainly be attributed to the Early Modern English era?  Does it now appear to be such a mixed bag?

[Calm]

Thank you for taking the time to clearly explain things, very useful and very interesting.

[champatsch]

10 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Have you found so far that ECCO removes much of the confusion stemming from the former notion that very late phrases were set over against early ones, so that it was not at all clear that the BofM could certainly be attributed to the Early Modern English era?  Does it now appear to be such a mixed bag?

It isn't such a mixed bag as has been thought, since now we know that the usage rates don't actually explode the way the Ngram Viewer leads us to believe. Peak popularity has moved back into the early modern era for some phrases. (Yet regardless, these contextual phrases are overruled by less contextual syntax for authorship determination.) I briefly mentioned the phrase "first parents" (1 Nephi 5:11). Here is an ECCO chart of that.

Compare it to the Ngram Viewer (smoothing of 4).

"First parents" was flat in the 1700s according to ECCO, but not according to GOOG. An earlier database I use indicates peak popularity in the 1610s, more than double the year 1800. And some of the rise we see here between 1801 and 1830 in the Ngram Viewer is a skewing brought on by multiple editions and the republishing of earlier texts, of which hath been spoken. So the 1610s is more likely to have been the peak than the early 1800s.

[Physics Guy]

It's not so clear to me that the ECCO results are really better than Google's. Are the corpuses different? If so, how? Apparently the ways that frequencies are computed are also different. Do I understand rightly that the ECCO percentages are so much higher than the Google percentages because the ECCO rates are per book and the Google rates are per word?

If the corpuses are significantly different then the differences in computation are an unfortunate confounding effect that makes it hard to interpret the differences in results. I'd like to see what ECCO's corpus gives using Google's criteria, and vice versa. It isn't clear to me that the ECCO criteria are really better.

Why is it wrong to count multiple uses of a phrase within the same book? Granted, an expression that's a constant refrain in just one obscure book might not really be popular, but short of that extreme it seems to me that an expression which is in frequent use in one particular context should be counted as being more common than one which appears in the same number of books but is never used more than once. This distinction seems especially important for the question of whether Smith might have used an expression heavily in his own composition. If an expression is never used frequently anywhere, then no-one will ever get the idea that they should use it heavily, but if an expression is used heavily in a few books of one particular kind, then anyone might get the notion of heavily using that expression, if they happened to read one of those books.

Likewise, why is it wrong to count multiple editions of the same book as distinct appearances of an expression? A book that goes through many editions would seem likely to spread its expressions to a wider public than a work that gets remaindered after limited first edition sales. Perhaps weighting by total sales figures would be better, but this information is likely hard to obtain.

On the other hand counting expressions per book will assign high popularity to terms used in many short publications. If posters composed in telegraphese were more common than hardcover books, for example, one might conclude that "a" and "the" were uncommon expressions, if one counted appearances per book and counted posters as books. I'm sure ECCO doesn't do anything so extreme as that, but some skewing toward that kind of distortion is what one can expect by counting appearances per book.

Edited May 23, 2018 by Physics Guy

[champatsch]

3 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

It's not so clear to me that the ECCO results are really better than Google's. Are the corpuses different? If so, how?

I think you can answer that yourself. GOOG is missing a lot of early data, in the early 1700s, as is clearly shown in the charts. And then when we compare EEBO to GOOG it's worse. GOOG doesn't have enough earlier data, searches that are often quite relevant to the Book of Mormon.  And why is that?  Because almost all the verbal system of the Book of Mormon fits 16c and 17c usage, not 18c usage. So it is consistent to consider that noun phrases in the Book of Mormon might represent earlier usage as much or more than later usage, since they are used in the midst of an archaic verbal system. Plus, all the brilliant blending of King James phraseology in the text, sometimes six or seven in a short passage, taken from all over the Bible (e.g. Moroni 10:30–31), obligatorily involves wording that is 16c in nature.

Consider just one important syntactic domain: verbal complementation. It is heavily finite in the Book of Mormon, far beyond the King James Bible or any pseudo-biblical text.  That feature is more characteristic of the early period than the later period.  Along with finite complementation comes optional modal auxiliary usage. The Book of Mormon has a large amount of it, and especially noteworthy is its prevalent modal shall usage, which is a strong marker of archaism.

Here are some examples of Book of Mormon bad grammar that were by no means cases of Joseph's bad grammar:

 

Complex finite complementation with redundant it and modal shall

3 Nephi 29:4 • page 641

And behold, at that day, if ye shall spurn at his doings, 
he will cause it that it shall soon overtake you.   [ it = the sword of the Lord's justice ]

See ATV under this verse, as well as GV 308. Doubled pronominals occur after the verb cause in the earliest text five times; complex finite complementation occurs a total of 12 times, including this one; that alone was a philological achievement on Joseph Smith's part!

1701 William Salmon [ 1644–1713 ] Polygraphice [8th edition] [Gale CW0106164956]

[ volume 2, page 919 ] for this will cause it, that it shall not easily come off,

I have seen four or five other original examples of "cause it that it", in the 1600s. This is the best match. A 1697 example may be due to a 1679 example. The others are in the early 1600s. The 1679/1697 language was quoted or republished up to 1725.

 

They as object of prepositions (or sometimes verbs)

Moroni 8:22

for the power of redemption cometh on all they that have no law.

This is just one of many such cases with object they and a defining relative clause.  "They that" would have been a distant word choice for Joseph Smith, well after "those/them who".

before 1670 Francis Howgill [ 1618–1669 ] The dawnings of the gospel-day (1676) [EEBO A44786]

[ page 392 ] and see if ever the true Church of Christ, or the Ministers thereof, Christ or his Apostles, gave any such Commandment, or did ever lay any such in⸗junction upon they that believed,

Other examples could be given.

 

So even a lot of bad grammar points away from Joseph Smith, as well as a lot of unobjectionable grammar and potentially obsolete lexis.

I suggest you read through GV (2016) and NOL (2018, forthcoming) and if you are discerning in your reading you may recognize the broad philological achievement.

[champatsch]

I should add that there's some validity in what you say, Physics Guy, and these things are reflected in charts, but it actually cuts both ways. And the other way it cuts can be striking. To be an honest, thorough researcher, one can't just focus on Book of Mormon phrases that appear strong, textually speaking, in the early 19c, and ignore phrases that were textually prevalent in the 16c or 17c. Take "fountain of all righteousness". It was at its peak in the 16c, according to Ngram Viewer rules, because of early translations of Calvin into English where the phrase was used many times (with difficult, archaic spellings, like ryghtuousnes). Consequently, the textual rate of that phrase, which occurs three times in the Book of Mormon, was at its absolute highest in the latter half of the 16c, when there were relatively few books and words published.

And of course genuine archaism is much more powerful evidence than all the persistent usage. Ten genuinely archaic things are much more meaningful than 100 persistent things. But if it doesn't fit a preferred position, there are ways around it. The way this is done isn't too difficult, if inaccurate and deceptive. Potential archaism is understated, or ignored, or it is simply asserted/stipulated that whatever the level or nature of Book of Mormon archaism, Joseph was able to produce it.

For example, one might say and even publish that there are only a few potentially obsolete lexical usages in the earliest text, instead of a few dozen (50 or so), which is the accurate figure. This was done very recently, and for now, I'll leave it at that.

[mfbukowski]

Pardon my ignorance but would someone please explain the relevance of this to the "truth" of the Book of Mormon?

[JarMan]

3 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Pardon my ignorance but would someone please explain the relevance of this to the "truth" of the Book of Mormon?

I don’t think this work is intended to be apologetic. It’s purely a scholarly exercise which is why I find it so compelling and fascinating. It doesn’t advance the faithful narrative in any meaningful way that I can see. The apologists have mostly reacted by ignoring it or trying to find weaknesses. This work does, however, put the last few nails in the coffin of the theory that Joseph or one of his contemporaries made it up. The 19th Century-model crowd has mainly reacted by refusing to read the actual studies while insisting that the work must be fatally flawed and they won’t believe otherwise unless some unbiased scholar comes along and blesses the work.

Accepting the results of this work means rethinking and reforming the Book of Mormon production narrative whether we are faithful or critical. But most people who have an opinion on this think they have it figured out already. This whole process is fascinating to watch play out. I predict that the overwhelming evidence will eventually gain enough traction that a completely new and different narrative will be formed. The faithful will mostly stay faithful and the critics will mostly stay critical. But those who stay faithful will end up with a greater understanding and appreciation of the Book of Mormon. 

[Physics Guy]

16 hours ago, champatsch said:

I think you can answer that yourself. GOOG is missing a lot of early data, in the early 1700s, as is clearly shown in the charts. And then when we compare EEBO to GOOG it's worse. GOOG doesn't have enough earlier data, searches that are often quite relevant to the Book of Mormon. 

Does this weakness of Google data for the early 1700s actually show up in the raw numbers of uses, as opposed to percentages? And are there specific documents missing from the Google corpus? If so, what kinds of documents is Google missing? Or are you just inferring Google's weakness from the differences in the percentages shown in these plots?

If the latter, the different percentages might not reflect any weakness in the Google corpus but only be due to the different methodologies. Perhaps these phrases which are more prevalent earlier according to ECCO's computation show up in a few short books, perhaps within a smaller corpus, and they're simply swamped in Google's larger corpus by the zillions of words in long books that never use these expressions, producing percentages so low that they look like zero in the plot.

[champatsch]

Physics Guy, you can download the total_counts file from the Google Books Ngram Viewer site and verify the following.  EEBO Phase 1 numbers below are my own, from a WordCruncher database I made.  Here are some stats:

There are only 4 million 16th-century words in Google Books (GB).  By way of comparison, EEBO Phase 1 texts have 135 million 16c words.  EEBO Phase 2 texts probably have more than 100 million 16c words (it has 10,000 more texts than EEBO 1, but many more shorter texts).  Thus the GB database underlying the Ngram Viewer is severely limited for this time period.  It's entirely unreliable for the 16c (as well as the 17c).  Also, spelling was all over the place in the 16c.

There are 60 million 17c words in GB—again, a very limited set.  EEBO1 has 625 million 17c words.  All of EEBO probably has well over 1 billion 17c words.  All told, GB is only about 5% of EEBO!

17c GB is 15 times the 16c GB in word count.  In EEBO1, the 17c is only 4.6 times the 16c.  Spelling has less variability in the 17c than in the 16c, but it is still quite variable.

There are 1.75 billion 18c words in GB.   I don't know how many words there are in Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).  But it contains over 33 million pages.  If we estimate, perhaps conservatively, 200 words per ECCO page, then the result from that estimate is that there are no more than one-fourth the words in 18c GB as in ECCO.  GB is probably no greater than 25% of ECCO!

GB has almost 21,000 18c volumes, three-fourths of these from 1750 on; ECCO has 200,000 18c volumes.  I don't know how many are early 18c.  But we know from the charts that GB is missing a lot of early 18c data.  (Spelling is close to the modern system, but still subject to a larger degree of variability than in the 19c.)

18c GB is 29 times 17c GB.

There are 48 billion 19c words in GB;
19c GB is 27 times 18c GB!

There are 290 billion 20c words in GB; 
20c GB is 6 times 19c GB.

It's important to bear all these things in mind when studying charts and usage rates.

[mfbukowski]

10 hours ago, JarMan said:

I don’t think this work is intended to be apologetic. It’s purely a scholarly exercise which is why I find it so compelling and fascinating. It doesn’t advance the faithful narrative in any meaningful way that I can see. .... This work does, however, put the last few nails in the coffin of the theory that Joseph or one of his contemporaries made it up. The 19th Century-model crowd has mainly reacted by refusing to read the actual studies while insisting that the work must be fatally flawed and they won’t believe otherwise unless some unbiased scholar comes along and blesses the work.

Accepting the results of this work means rethinking and reforming the Book of Mormon production narrative whether we are faithful or critical. But most people who have an opinion on this think they have it figured out already. This whole process is fascinating to watch play out. I predict that the overwhelming evidence will eventually gain enough traction that a completely new and different narrative will be formed. The faithful will mostly stay faithful and the critics will mostly stay critical. But those who stay faithful will end up with a greater understanding and appreciation of the Book of Mormon. 

I edited out one sentence above, and to me, it is clear that it IS apologetic in nature, putting the "nail in the coffin" and all and presuming that "reforming the Book of Mormon production narrative" will help the world accept it as the spiritual masterpiece it is.

 But perhaps it is just that merely asking the question changes the perspective of the answer.  That is a common problem- like the famous "When did you stop beating your wife?"  Asking that question that way of course presumes that there was in fact wife-beating going on, and perhaps my question forced the perspective into looking at the question apologetically. 

But I can see it also as scholarly puzzle-solving I suppose.

Obviously there are much smarter people than me working on this so there has to be something there but I am still not sure I get it.  As usual though I am of the opinion that we need to get past the search for objective evidence for spiritual matters in order to convince this secular world we find ourselves in that there is more to spirituality than scientific "facts".

We MUST communicate that somehow to the secular world!  Spirituality has its own justification far beyond historical or scientific "facts" but today's world is spiritually blind.

  But many times scholarly investigation starts from a "hunch" and then proceeds along to eventually find something earth-shattering.

I am a big picture guy and often miss the importance of details, so I am just trying to get educated about where this line of inquiry could lead, so any help is appreciated, and I have tremendous respect for those working on this.

[RevTestament]

On 5/22/2018 at 11:36 AM, champatsch said:

For example, the Book of Mormon has a lot of causative syntax, about 250 instances of it. And about 55% of it has finite complementation — e.g. "caused that he (should) ..." (6×) — totally different from the King James Bible, which is 99% infinitival — e.g. "caused him to ..." (7×; once in the Book of Mormon).  Heavier finite complementation is characteristic of Early Modern English (but not up to Book of Mormon levels). We can check this sort of thing for the beginning of the modern period in an ECCO popularity chart and see that there was no heavy finite complementation after the verb cause throughout the 1700s. Indeed, there was hardly any. (Of course finite examples can be found in the databases, but usage rates are exceedingly low.)

We conclude from this that the distinctive patterns of use we find in the Book of Mormon almost certainly didn't emanate from Joseph Smith's own language.  Ten or so pseudo-biblical texts support this view.  These authors didn't generalize from the Bible's three cases of finite cause syntax (out of 300) and produce 50% finite complementation. In fact, there is no finite complementation in their writings. Heavy finite complementation — which ran counter to their infinitival native-speaker competence — didn't happen for any of these authors.

 

Can you give more than one example of causative archaic syntax peculiar to the Book of Mormon as compared to the KJV or other sources of JS' day? 

Will this appear in a book or a paper?

[champatsch]

1 Nephi 17:46 • page 55

And ye also know that by the power of his almighty word
he can cause the earth that it shall pass away.

2 Nephi 5:17 • page 90

And it came to pass that I Nephi did cause my people
that they should be industrious
and that they should labor with their hands.

Mosiah 6:7 • page 210

And king Mosiah did cause his people that they should till the earth,

Alma 21:3 • page 356

Therefore they did cause the Lamanites that they should harden their hearts,
that they should wax stronger in wickedness and their abominations.

Alma 58:11 • page 488

and did cause us that we should hope for our deliverance in him.

Alma 60:17 • page 495

causing them that they should suffer all manner of afflictions

Helaman 16:20 • page 562

to cause us that we should believe
in some great and marvelous thing which should come to pass,

3 Nephi 2:3 • page 568

tempting them and causing them that they should do great wickedness in the land.

Mormon 3:5 • page 653

And it came to pass that I did cause my people
that they should gather themselves together at the land Desolation

Ether 9:33 • page 697

And it came to pass that the Lord did cause the serpents
that they should pursue them no more,
but that they should hedge up the way,

[Physics Guy]

17 hours ago, champatsch said:

There are only 4 million 16th-century words in Google Books (GB).  By way of comparison, EEBO Phase 1 texts have 135 million 16c words.    ...  Also, spelling was all over the place in the 16c.

There are 60 million 17c words in GB ... All of EEBO probably has well over 1 billion 17c words. 

17c GB is 15 times the 16c GB in word count.  In EEBO1, the 17c is only 4.6 times the 16c.  Spelling has less variability in the 17c than in the 16c, but it is still quite variable.

There are 1.75 billion 18c words in GB.   ... If we estimate, perhaps conservatively, 200 words per ECCO page, then the result from that estimate is that there are no more than one-fourth the words in 18c GB as in ECCO. ...

Okay, thanks. I agree that this kind of difference in corpus size would probably make Google's usage rates less reliable, unless the EEBO corpus was doing something really weird like collecting a ton of little broadsheets that had very low circulation. And in fact my guess would be that that kind of corpus bias is more likely to be the other way around, with Google's smaller sample relying too much on the big fat old books that have survived in libraries and thus been easier to find, but that were never actually read very much in their day.

The apparently large differences in corpus size, and possibly also in corpus representativeness, are indeed important points to bear in mind when looking at historical usage statistics. The plots and statements in your original post didn't mention them, so I asked. Your answer looks good to me. Thanks.

[JarMan]

On 5/24/2018 at 9:45 AM, mfbukowski said:

I edited out one sentence above, and to me, it is clear that it IS apologetic in nature, putting the "nail in the coffin" and all and presuming that "reforming the Book of Mormon production narrative" will help the world accept it as the spiritual masterpiece it is.

 But perhaps it is just that merely asking the question changes the perspective of the answer.  That is a common problem- like the famous "When did you stop beating your wife?"  Asking that question that way of course presumes that there was in fact wife-beating going on, and perhaps my question forced the perspective into looking at the question apologetically. 

But I can see it also as scholarly puzzle-solving I suppose.

Obviously there are much smarter people than me working on this so there has to be something there but I am still not sure I get it.  As usual though I am of the opinion that we need to get past the search for objective evidence for spiritual matters in order to convince this secular world we find ourselves in that there is more to spirituality than scientific "facts".

We MUST communicate that somehow to the secular world!  Spirituality has its own justification far beyond historical or scientific "facts" but today's world is spiritually blind.

  But many times scholarly investigation starts from a "hunch" and then proceeds along to eventually find something earth-shattering.

I am a big picture guy and often miss the importance of details, so I am just trying to get educated about where this line of inquiry could lead, so any help is appreciated, and I have tremendous respect for those working on this.

Everybody seems to be missing the obvious, which is that the Book of Mormon is an early modern production: not 19th Century, not 6th Century BC, not 4th or 5th Century AD. This is true, not just with the language, but with the thematic elements as well. 

Some themes are what would be expected from an ancient Jewish culture and some are what we would expect from a 19th Century American culture. But neither of these cultures is a match for all the Book of Mormon themes. However, all Book of Mormon themes make sense from an early modern perspective as far as I can tell. 

Assuming for a moment this is true, the critics can obviously say this shows the Book of Mormon is a fraud. In my opinion faithful LDS ought to be preparing responses to those sorts of criticisms. It’s kind of like scholarship that shows the Pentateuch was not written by Moses or that some of the books in the Bible were not actually written by the person who purportedly wrote them. We can pretend the scholarship is not valid or we can embrace the scholarship and attempt to explain why these facts don’t diminish the importance of the scripture. 

LDS scholars can get out in front of the critics if they choose to pursue the early modern production hypothesis. This will allow them to control the narrative instead of playing defense to the critics. But people (on both sides) seem to be too entrenched, holding to a ridiculous narrative, rather than taking this work seriously and seeing what is right in front of them. 

[mfbukowski]

18 hours ago, JarMan said:

Everybody seems to be missing the obvious, which is that the Book of Mormon is an early modern production: not 19th Century, not 6th Century BC, not 4th or 5th Century AD. This is true, not just with the language, but with the thematic elements as well. 

Some themes are what would be expected from an ancient Jewish culture and some are what we would expect from a 19th Century American culture. But neither of these cultures is a match for all the Book of Mormon themes. However, all Book of Mormon themes make sense from an early modern perspective as far as I can tell. 

Assuming for a moment this is true, the critics can obviously say this shows the Book of Mormon is a fraud. In my opinion faithful LDS ought to be preparing responses to those sorts of criticisms. It’s kind of like scholarship that shows the Pentateuch was not written by Moses or that some of the books in the Bible were not actually written by the person who purportedly wrote them. We can pretend the scholarship is not valid or we can embrace the scholarship and attempt to explain why these facts don’t diminish the importance of the scripture. 

LDS scholars can get out in front of the critics if they choose to pursue the early modern production hypothesis. This will allow them to control the narrative instead of playing defense to the critics. But people (on both sides) seem to be too entrenched, holding to a ridiculous narrative, rather than taking this work seriously and seeing what is right in front of them. 

I agree with you but don't think this post helps faithful Mormons who have grown up with the traditional view of the Book of Mormon in particular as scripture in general.

You don't explain why it's historical origins are irrelevant to their spirituality , but instead support exploring them further historically.

On the other hand I think that understanding that historicity and authorship is irrelevant to what we spiritually find to be scripture is what needs to be stressed.

That is the tacit assumption of your post anyway, but you do not explain why it is still scripture without the traditional assumptions about its origin

That is my goal and think that kind of explanation is what is essential to accompany such historical data.

 

[cinepro]

On 5/22/2018 at 11:36 AM, champatsch said:

 

 

 

Can you show the ECCO graphs extended through 1830 or later?

Also, can you explain which specific argument you're trying to counter that involves ngrams and Book of Mormon phrases?  Because I don't see how the case gets better for the "divine theory of translation" when it is shown that the phrases were more commonly used.  What are the ngram people claiming, exactly?