A Look at Google Trends For Rap Slang

Yesterday, my boss at my day job asked me what "thot" means. The circle was complete. I cringed lovingly, then reluctantly told her. She said, "Wow, that's brilliant. I can't wait to use that." For her own sake, I responded "Please don't. Thot is dead."

We have a sense for these things. For example, when Diplo tweeted "tater thot" a couple months ago, it felt like it was high time for everyone to go home. Rap vernacular comes and goes, but with the power of Google Trends, we can actually look at when these words peak. If you've ever wondered whether you were late, or if you want to avoid making the same puns everyone else made a year prior, come and explore the life and death of some of the words that pay the bills over at Urban Dictionary. Then you can 1. go clown your friends whenever they use outdated language (e.g. "yolo"), 2. bandwagon one of French Montana's yet to be globally espoused etymological sublimations (e.g. "alphet"), or 3. try to bring back a vestige that our public vocabulary all but abandoned years ago (e.g. "thizz").

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Let's start with "yolo," a word which was apparently a self-fulfilling prophecy for its own use. We appear to have moved far beyond its apex, which it reached some time in 2012. Its meteoric rise was closely associated with Drake's "The Motto" (early 2012), and the end of its short life span was punctuated by an SNL parody song (early 2013). Popular queries include "what does yolo," "what yolo mean," and "swag yolo." Which leads us to our next subject: "swag."

"Swag" appears to have some longevity in the game. Though it reached a peak in 2012, when it was still popular to repeat the word in perpetuity, or to replace the affirmative response "yes," it has since dropped into a plateau of steady interest for the last couple of years. Popular queries include "my swag," "the swag," "swag boy," and "tumblr swag." Just to remind you, these are all real things that many real humans have typed into their computers. The people need answers.

Moving on to a personal favorite: "fanute." As you can fanute from the graph, the word was nonexistent before French Montana unwittingly invented it on "Stay Schemin'." Since then, it had its moment, and has since bounced its way out of human-computer curiosity and relevance. But French has not left us hanging. Ever since he tweeted the word "alphet," his amazing misspelling has all but eclipsed its correctly spelled predecessor, and will, with any luck, fanute the word "outfit" altogether.

Finally, "thot" vs. "bae," which exists as real life tension for many people. As you can see, "thot" is finally on its decline. "Bae" is still skyrocketing. Sure, we can attribute this discrepancy to various analytics that we don't understand or to languages we don't care to investigate (for example, "bae" is killing it in Brunei and Burma right now), but let's just say it's a new age for the world. Everyone is getting married, people are staying together, and the global bae is boxing out the global thot.

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 Otherworldly drama has had a special place in TV fans' hearts since the days of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Charmed. Fiction has gradually evolved vampires and werewolves from malevolent and hostile creatures to being compassionate near-human heroes.

True Blood has changed the way we perceive vampires. It went from portraying vampires as a minority class to a world where they live openly and somewhat amicably with humans, fairies and werewolves. Seasons 2 and 3 of True Blood garnered the highest spike of interest the series has ever seen, more than double of Season 1. Despite its devoted fan following, though, online interest in the current and final season has dwindled, as you can see in this Google Trends graph (Google normalizes its graphs so the peak search activity has a value of 100).

While the rest of us were out frolicking in the sun, The New York Times' Upshot blog spent the early part of the summer sussing out which counties in the United States were the easiest and hardest to live in. After a little extra prompting from Google's chief economist, editor David Leonhardt and the Upshot team used Google Correlate to dig into what these groups on either side of the digital divide were searching for online. Some terms -- the like "Oprah" and "Super Bowl" - are searched for by just about everyone. As you might've guessed, though, those search terms ultimately diverge... pretty wildly.

In the so-called easiest locales (which scored best when it came to education, median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity) the terms that correlate most strongly with easy living locations include "elph," "jogger" and "nb-4l". Apparently those who live in well-to-do areas had plenty of questions about Canon digital cameras. And the top three search terms for those living in harder areas? "Free diabetic," "antichrist" and "38 revolver". The list speaks to a dramatic difference in what people concern themselves with when their life circumstances skew in one direction or another. It doesn't take long to notice certain trends popping up, either -- technological tidbits pepper the rest of the easy life list, while religious references figure prominently in its rougher counterpart. These particular rabbit holes run deeper than you might think, so it's definitely worth checking out the full Times piece for more.