This week: Content is king! Or something. We do some corpus research to figure it out and take a couple of surprising detours along the way. Let’s get to it.
Over the past weeks, we've been discussing words that serve as containers for groups of words1. Words like essay, report, letter, and dictionary - these words give shape to large groups of words and provide a context by which we can set our expectations. And yet, much like the One Ring, there is one word that can take all these other containers and in the darkness bind them. Or something like that.
These days, it seems like content is king. We've got content marketing, social media content, and even the possessive my content as common bits of the vernacular. And yet, when you start digging into it, this particular use of content isn't all that old. In fact, it's a prime example of language change in action2. See, most of us of a certain age, probably grew up thinking of contents rather than content. Every book you saw had a table of contents and even things like recipes called for moving the contents of one bowl into the other. But content? Uncountable noun? When did that happen?
Honestly? We don't know, exactly. So, let's back up a second and talk about what we do know. And that means turning to our good friend Merriam-Webster. They list content and contents as the same word, stating that it is, "usually used in plural." More importantly, they provide a sub-definition to help explain:
1a: something contained —usually used in plural
b : the topics or matter treated in a written work
c : the principal substance (such as written matter, illustrations, or music) offered by a website
Now, it's interesting to me that their definition specifies "offered by a website," a limitation I think that might be a little out of date. But it made me curious about some of the more recent history of content and so I went digging into a couple of corpus tools, Google's Ngram viewer and the EEBO corpus3.
To start, content is one of those words that prove difficult to research because it has so many uses and forms. In other words, you can't just search for content without getting back too much data to process. So you need to build a collocation or a search string. I went with the three mentioned in the intro paragraph: social media content, content marketing, and my content.
For the first of these, Google Books shows exactly zero examples before 1984. Even then, there are only a scant few until we hit 2005. From there, until 2019, which is as far forward as we can currently search, the term goes through a steady increase in usage until, in 2019, social media content accounts for 0.000009 percent of all three-word phrases in Google's database. This may not look like a lot, but, for context, Google's database is close to 200 billion words. Billion. Note the B. Let me just put a quick search into Wolfram Alpha...18,000. So, in a little under 15 years, we go from 0 to 18,000.
How about content marketing? We see a similar pattern, although there were isolated hits here and there throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, we don't really see it as a recurring phrase until the early 90s. Even then, it isn't until 2007 that it gets a frequency of 0.0000002 (400 results). Then, between 2007 to 2019, it skyrockets by a whopping 00% to 0.00002 (40,000 results). Just a little change.
But the truly interesting one is my content. As you might expect, given the number of people out there talking about the content they make for social media (like, uhm, this newsletter!), the phrase is pretty popular in 2019 with a score of 0.000006 (12,000), it wasn't nearly as popular in the '80s. Unless we're talking about the 1880s, and the 80 years before that. Wait, what? That's right, the phrase "my content" scores a whopping 0.000009 (18,000 results) in 1804!
The discrepancy, of course, is that there is yet another noun meaning for content that I had completely neglected to account for. It's content as satisfaction4, a usage that, while not that common today, lingers on in idioms like "to your heart's content." Still, to verify that this older meaning could account for why the phrase turned up in so many old books, I took a look at the EEBO (Early English Books Online), a British corpus with results that go back to the 1500s. My search returned 300 samples from between the years 1580 to 1690, a quick scan of which confirmed my theory.
So where does that leave us? Back where we started, kind of. The tools I have access to right now are limited in scope. We can see through them that content to mean a form of transmissible communication is growing in usage and scope. Unfortunately, they do not yet have the data that will allow us to update the dictionary, but, give it a few years and we'll be able to see exactly when the collocation of YouTube+content became so prevalent. We'll be able to put a pin in the exact moment that content began to mean more than just "written matter, illustrations, or music" and instead began to mean Tik Tok videos, NFTs5, and holograms of all our dead musical heroes. We'll just have to be content with the content we have until then.
Stay curious,
J
Side Notes:
I couldn't fit this into the article proper, but I thought it was interesting. The word content is what's sometimes called a heteronym and sometimes called, ahem, an initial-stress-derived noun. Both terms are fancy-talk for words that are written the same but pronounced differently and with different meanings. The latter (initial-stress) is just adding the detail that the noun form is stressed at the beginning of the word while the adjective is stressed in the second half.
Let me give a concrete example.
Charlie Brown has never been content with his lot in life and is therefore constantly trying to better himself even in the face of overwhelming doubt and anxiety6.
Lucy Van Pelt's podcast has a lot of interesting content about pulling footballs away from overly optimistic fools.
Also, content is a little unusual in that it is both a countable and uncountable noun with different nuances for each form. To my knowledge, there is no category-level word for words in this class. But think about words like business or cinema that function as both a specific instance of a place as well as the broader category of use. Content and contents are both nouns, but they feel a little different, don’t they?
Volume 4 of Learned, of which this series is a fraction, is subtitled "Words We Use When We Talk About Words." Volume 5, which begins in two weeks, will be "Say It Again But Slowly." Just so you know.
If you had "research opportunity" or "dissertation topic" on this week's Bingo card, congratulations! You can cross it off.
Both these tools search through specialized databases to find matches of specific search strings in context and with relevant data. However. The examples I'm going to show here are cursory at best and should be taken as a starting point only.
I feel like we'd probably use "contentment" today, but I could be wrong.
No, I don't get it either.
I may or may not find one of these characters more relatable than the other.