Here we see a plot of occurrences of three different “bigrams” shown as a percentage of all words and meaningful bigrams in a statistically significant sample of books published in English between 1898 and 2008. By 1910 the Secondo Pia excitement of 1898 had faded. STURP was in 1978 and the carbon dating in 1988. The carbon dating of the shroud was being doubted in some quarters by the mid-1990s onward and Rogers’ paper was published in 2005. The data is not available beyond 2008. It will be interesting to see what it shows. Values before 1898 are consistently about zero going back to 1600.

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Does this tell us anything or is it just interesting?

Source: Google Labs