4

I just watched the movie The Bucket List, in which one character explains to another what the expression in the title means. It was interesting to me, because I did not know that the expression has such a brief pedigree.

And I've since read another article here about the expression.

But I also looked at the Google Books ngram for the expression, where you see that remarkable surge in the use of the expression around the time of the film's release.

enter image description here

But what was going on in 1900? Compared with the interesting condition around the release of this particular film, it's easy to overlook the mere baby bump one century earlier.

enter image description here

Was there a comparable event that popularized the expression at that time? What did the expression mean to that generation?

Improve this question
11
  • 2
    Some of the early matches are false. They're "... bucket. List ..." where the words are in two different sentences. Commented Jun 10 at 17:08
  • 1
    @Barmar It seems like false matches should not create a graph like that. Why should false matches proliferate for those 20 years and then return the x-axis whence they came? Commented Jun 10 at 17:37
  • It wasn't 20 years, as the comment from @NuclearHoagie reveals. Interestingly, there was also a small spike in "to-do list" coinciding with "bucket list" in 1900. What was going on? Commented Jun 10 at 18:23
  • I think the ngrams algorithm simply ignores punctuation so false matches like this are pretty common. Commented Jun 10 at 19:34
  • Discussing the workings of Google NGrams or other Google searches is off-topic. There doesn't seem to be a genuine linguistic phenomenon here. If you want more info, I'm sure there are subreddits (r/ngrams seems a good candidate) or other discussion sites devoted to the topic. If you wanted to do research yourself, you could view other questions about NGrams here, because there are several similar ones where someone has noticed something odd and the reason has turned out to be some quirk in NGrams. Commented Jun 11 at 10:45

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
13

Looking through the Google hits for pre-1920's usage of "bucket list", most valid hits of the phrase (that don't span a sentence or punctuation break) seem to refer to a literal of list of buckets advertised for sale or referenced in spec sheets, as in an elevator-scoop type bucket used in the booming coal mining industry at the turn of the 20th century (as seen here).

If you turn off smoothing in the ngrams plot, it becomes clearer that this isn't a trend persisting over a decade, but isolated usage restricted to 1900 and 1901 only. Also worth noting that many of the hits that ngrams returns are false - examining just a few pages of hits, we find books attributed to the wrong year, entries mis-processed with OCR, and adjacent words that span sentences/punctuation and are not an example of the phrase itself.

Improve this answer
4
  • 1
    Why the sharply defined vogue, 1895-1905? For example, did Google Books just archive one of those popular coal-mining-themed periodicals for just that period, so that the graph reflects almost nothing about actual language use? Or did some technological changes lead people to discuss bucket lists for that precise 20-year period? Commented Jun 10 at 17:34
  • 5
    If you turn off smoothing in ngrams, you can see that it's not a decade-long vogue, but very isolated usage in the year 1900 and 1901 only, with near-zero usage otherwise. The usage numbers are basically non-existent, I'd think a handful of ads would register as a spike. Commented Jun 10 at 18:08
  • 3
    @Chaim Not only is it a small spike in 1900–1901, it appears to be a false spike in those years. If you click through to the actual search results and filter by date between 1899 and 1902, you get just one hit: The Bucket List. Everything Left Undone (Part I) by Lena Fox. Google Books has this book indexed as being from 1900, but it very obviously is not – the colophon isn’t shown in the preview, but Googling it tells me it’s actually from 2018. Commented Jun 11 at 15:29
  • 1
    Incidentally, the numbers in Ngrams do not represent search results in Books; I believe the two are independent systems. And so, if you see a number in Ngrams, you may not get any results in Books; but that doesn't necessarily mean the numbers in Ngram are false (though they may very well be). Conversely, if you get results in Books, that doesn't necessarily mean the number Ngrams is also based on those. Commented Jun 11 at 20:03

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.