or a serious time waster. In any case, this is a rather witty article about something I had no clue about until today. (Thank you, GeekMom.com) 
It is lots of fun to play with.
Hah! I’m friends with one of the GeekDads, so this makes me smile.
darn right baseball wins.
people really wrote about frack and frak back in the 1800s?
I always gets these two confused…
by the way, it’s funny how freedom was at its peak during the 1970s, far out man, that’s groovy.
it’s certainly become my hobby…
Taiwan was first known to the world as Formosa, since originally Taiwan is only the name of a harbor. Later it became the name for the city next to the harbor, and for some reason it eventually meant the whole island. It was interesting to see when exactly the usage of Taiwan over took the usage of Formosa in English publications.
I was impressed by this graph. It’s the 3 historical names for Taipei. Tamsui came first. During the later part of the 1800s and the early part of the 1900s, England/Germany did a lot of trade with Taiwan.
The dip of the mentioning of Tamsui around 1900s reflects when Japan took over Taiwan, and at first forced all goods exports to go through Japan. It wasn’t until 1912 when England renegotiated rental of Fort Anthonio as British base for trading that Tamsui started to pick up again in English mentions.
But soon it fell, as the usage of the Japanese name Taihoku starts to pickup. Also the Japanese forced all transports to go through Keelung instead. By the time the British Douglas Steam Ship Co. withdrew its post in Tamsui in 1921, Tamsui all but disappeared in English publishing.
Usage of Taipei picked up after the Chiang Kai-shek regime occupied Taiwan in 1949.
It’s pretty interesting that ngram findings reflects history so well. Really fun to play with.
well… what does it mean? 
Japan invaded Skywalker ranch?
they once owned the Empire State Building, so, you can never rule that out. Lucas obviously named Padame and Anakin after some Japanese businessman’s children.
You’d think there would be a little spike at the end of that graph since the new Star Trek film was released in 2009. Le sigh. 
Actually the data only goes through 2008, so that’s why we aren’t seeing the spike from the reboot. 
Also I’d guess that the big Star Wars spike is because it’s picking up references to the movies and the defense system.
I have to wonder. What is the ratio of Star Wars references to Star Trek references in pop culture? Only going by box office gross, Star Wars must be more identifiable.
The marketing blitz of Star Wars contributes to that too, at least when it comes to toys. No Star Trek Legos.
I think google has its data up to 2008, so i am sure trek would make a jump when google updates its data
It’s weird how the frequency of both words dropped over time, too. Hmph.