Writing in 1978 about the future of language, the novelist Anthony Burgess speculated that one trend would be that “language will be cut off from its roots in basic physical experience.” There will, he wrote, “be a large everyday technical vocabulary to replace the old natural one.” But what we will end up with will be a “language of the brain rather than of the body.”36
Burgess was looking to a time far distant from our own—the year 3000, in fact—but his point already resonates. Digital technologies are above all technologies of the mind, and the realm they most expand is one of mediated rather than physical experience: brain, not body, in Burgess’s formulation.
It’s interesting to look for evidence of the trend Burgess suggests—and a little tricky, not least because linguistic decline is harder to measure than the coining of new terms. One helpful resource, however, is Google’s Ngram Viewer for its digital books service. This free online resource allows you to search for how frequently a word appeared within hundreds of thousands of books over the last few hundred years.37
The results are plotted as a graph and trace the percentage of total books within which the word in question was found, giving a sense over time of a word’s increasing or decreasing popularity. Obviously enough, terms like computer change from an insignificant level of usage before the 1940s to a steep, steady increase beginning around 1950 (and peaking just before 1990, with the arrival of other increasingly common digital terms: internet and web only really begin to show up on the graph at this point).
As an anecdotal test, I plotted on the graph the names of five of the most common British trees and birds, excluding those which—like “swallow” and “ash”—share their name with other unrelated words or names. This resulted in graphs tracing between 1900 and 2000 the occurrence of these words within English-language books: oak, elm, chestnut, hawthorn, yew; sparrow, blackbird, starling, finch, plover.
Every single one showed some degree of decline, perhaps suggesting—as Burgess argued—the lessening importance of the natural environment relative to the manufactured world; or at least a lessening interest among writers and readers in naming its specifics.
Also noteworthy is the rise in recent decades of natural and biological metaphors to describe the world’s ever-more-complex digital systems: from app “ecosystems” to the “media landscape” itself: signs, perhaps, of an increasing tendency to treat technology itself as a kind of second nature.
Mine is hardly a rigorous experiment. It doesn’t, however, need much investigation to discover an area of vocabulary in which perhaps the greatest growth in naming has taken place over the last century: that of machines, a field which has grown more thickly populated with every decade. At the start of the twentieth century, train ruled the roost, overtaken by car come the mid-1920s. Radio briefly took the lead around 1940; but the supremacy of computer since the late 1970s has left trains, cars, radios, and television all trailing in its wake.
Today, in fact, computer is a more common word in the corpus of English writing, as measured by Google, even than machine. Not to mention—a fact that Burgess might have found of a piece with his predictions—there has been considerably more computer since around 1980 than either tree or bird (although book, at least, remains more common than them all combined).