I plugged “Ice Cream” into the Google N-Gram viewer, and this is what popped up:
I’m not surprised that there are relatively few references at the start of the 19th century, but I am surprised at how low. I assume that’s because the Ice Industry didn’t get started until 1806, when they started cutting ice in the winter in New England or Scandinavia and shipping it in sawdust to warehouses in warmer zones. But ice cream dates back at least to the Persian empire several centuries BCE – I guess it really WAS an extremely rare luxury until the Ice Houses started.
Even more surprising, though, is the dip that started in 1945 and didn’t reverse until about 1970. What? Howard Johnson’s had been operating for decades (since 1925), and was soon joined by Carvel (1928) and Dairy Queen (1940) and Good Humor (started 1920, expanded 1930s), all of which continued to operate and expand in the 1950s. How can that family-friendly period be a nadir for ice cream?
“Chewing Gum” shows a similar rise from obscurity in the early 19th century, with a drop after 1940 to a nadir in the early 1960s.
Again – why? I was a kid then – there was plenty of gum stuck to the streets.
You could argue that these Ngrams only reflect uses in print, but you’d think that would correlate pretty well with use – the Ngrams sample advertising as well as articles. Did people not write as much about ice cream and gum between WWII and the Baby Boomers’ coming of age? It doesn’t seem likely.
My wild ass guess is chocolate was rationed during the war and hard to come by so people got used to doing without it. As it got cheaper and easier to produce again, it crept back into people’s lives and became popular again.
“sex”, you’ll be happy to know, doesn’t behave like that:
But “movies”, although it has a later start that the above, shows that same dip from WWII through the 1960s.
This can’t be a real affect. I can’t believe that people in the 1950s talked, wrote, and advertised less about Ice Cream, Chocolate, Drugs, Roller Coasters, and Movies than before or afterwards. Didn’t people then have any FUN?
It must be some weird feature of the data-gathering.
‘comic book’ continues to rise after WWII, but peaks in the late 1950s and doesn’t start up again until the early 1960s.
It’s just possible – but Fredric Wertham’s anti-comic crusade was in 1954, and comics continue to go up for quite a while after that. The Silver Age started circa 1958. Even if people weren’t writing about them in news magazines until the later 1960s, there must still have been advertising material and the like by 1960 – not to mention the comics themselves.
“ice cream cone” dips circa 1960, although it’s not as severe
Hot dog shows a slight dip
“hamburger” doesn’t dip, but it’s FLAT during the era when drive-in places were supposed to be popular, and MacDonald’s and Burger King started growing.
There’s evben a decline for “cocktail” and “cocktails”. In the 1950s? and early 1960s? This is the Mad Men era. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The Organization Man. How to Succeed in Business without really Trying. The Playboy Pad era. This was supposed to be the era of social drinking
I think so too. Maybe there is a dip in the number of available publications to search. Maybe some records were lost and/or never digitized. Sometimes publications do get lost, especially if they were intended as cheap entertainment that wasn’t meant to last.
“Disney” peaks in the early 1940s then declines to a level value?
What? No buzz about “Disney” with the opening of Disneyland in 1955? A negligible rise through the animated releases of the 19650s, the “Disneyland TV show”, the pioneering “Wonderful World of Color” in 1961 (one of the very few all-color TV broadcasts back then). No upticks because of the Disney creations for the 1964-5 World’s Fair (The Pepsi Cola “It’s a Small World After All”, the Ford Pavilion’s journey through time, the GE “House of Tomorrow”)
I really don’t buy it. If this chart is true, Disney should’ve fired all his publicity people.