Timeline for Is it "close-minded" or "closed-minded"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
23 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 8, 2011 at 12:53 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Callithumpian: I can see one day soon I need to learn how to use .se 'chat'. We prolly shouldn't drag this one out here because the system will be flagging it up to mods as an 'extended discussion'. | |
| Jun 8, 2011 at 5:39 | comment | added | mplungjan | I thought it was tl;dr :) | |
| Jun 8, 2011 at 4:02 | comment | added | Callithumpian | @Fumble: Not sure what we're doing differently. If I follow your process and then enter a "custom range" in Books of 1700-1959, I still get the 213 number (more when "sorted by date" for some reason) after jumping to the end of 22 pages of results. | |
| Jun 8, 2011 at 3:35 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Callithumpian: There are at least two levels of 'duplicate' - the ones where Google just bungles its own estimate of how many hits it will have to show you, and the ones where the same text is in multiple publications. I didn't even realise I could search before 1700 (the default start date), but I don't see how it would make that much difference. I actually count 92 entries 1700-1959 if I go thru NGrams and force it to show me every page. And at a rough guess 20-25 of those 92 are the same text appearing in multiple publications. | |
| Jun 8, 2011 at 3:15 | comment | added | Callithumpian | @Fumble: I think this explains what is happening. New to me. Don't know whether or not to trust the automated "collapsing." If it's accurate, then I should say there are 213 non-duplicate hits of close-minded from 1/1/1500 to 12/31/1959. Either way, I prefer to do my main searches directly through Google Books rather than via Ngram, as you suggested to @John above. | |
| Jun 8, 2011 at 2:38 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Callithumpian: I don't really understand. I get about 90 NGram 'English' hits for close minded over 1700-1959, and I can see at a glance that many of them are duplicates of the very same text, so the real number of occurences may be nearer 50. NGrams lies through its teeth though - first it says 83 hits for 1847-1896, but as I actually scroll through pages it keep reducing the number until it finally admits there are only 55. Many of which are simply the same article/essay appearing in multiple publications. | |
| Jun 8, 2011 at 2:15 | comment | added | Callithumpian | @Fumble: I think my answer shows that it wasn't always used as a term for "reticent" pre-1960s. I also think it (the "reticent" sense) was more commonly understood than you give it credit. Google Books gives it over 300 hits in print pre-1960 with many of them being in very mainstream publications. That said, I do think your observation about the "reticent" meaning is the key to understanding the actual history of these phrases. | |
| Jun 8, 2011 at 1:32 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Callithumpian: I think what it shows is that close-minded was always an unremarkable but fairly uncommon term for "reticent". Its usage in recent times to mean "intellectually unadventurous" is an almost exclusively American bowlderisation of closed-minded. | |
| Jun 8, 2011 at 1:19 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @John: You can always bypass that 40-book minimum by just selecting "[more->]books" from the standard Google screen. No graphs, but at least it'll find even a single occurrence if it's in their corpus. | |
| Jun 8, 2011 at 1:04 | comment | added | Callithumpian | @John: Interesting about the British corpus. This means the earlier sense of close-minded as uncommunicative was chiefly, if not exclusively, American. | |
| Jun 8, 2011 at 1:00 | history | edited | Callithumpian | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added a link to your Ngram
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| Jun 8, 2011 at 0:53 | comment | added | Kit Z. Fox♦ | @John I'm not convinced that "closed-minded" is semantically correct (cf. my rationale for using "close-minded"). If you want to post an answer arguing this point of view, I would be happy to read it. | |
| Jun 7, 2011 at 22:51 | comment | added | John Bartholomew | @FumbleFingers: Sorry, my use of 'hits' was misleading. I mean it has zero usage according to the ngrams search (or at least it's below the 40-book minimum that ngrams applies). I would imagine these counts are not subject to the same types of errors as the Google search hit-count estimate (though they are subject to different sources of error). | |
| Jun 7, 2011 at 22:33 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @John Bartholomew: I'm betting that - as so often - US usage leads the way in bringing 'specialist medical terminology' into the mainstream, and while they were about it they dropped that awkward 'd'. The smoothing is pretty weird, I agree. Made worse because there aren't that many hits to work with in the first place. Also note that (as with Google itself), the number of hits listed on the first page is usually boll**ks for these narrow searches. If you start paging through them all you usually reach the end way before you've seen as many as it originally claimed. | |
| Jun 7, 2011 at 22:19 | comment | added | John Bartholomew | @FumbleFingers: Just had a little play with ngrams myself (which I haven't really touched before). Two things I note: firstly, the smoothing value makes a massive difference to the shape of the result, and I'm not sure my signal-processing-fu is strong enough to properly interpret the results given that. Second, the British English corpus gives no hits for 'close-minded' at all, which may explain why I find it odd (being British myself). | |
| Jun 7, 2011 at 21:58 | history | edited | FumbleFingers | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 110 characters in body
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| Jun 7, 2011 at 21:56 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @John Bartholomew: But we also need to explain the dramatic fall in popularity of closed-minded in the late 70's, which is clearly not mirrored by any switch to the alternative. I still believe this is because the professionals (who I think only ever used the semantically accurate form) dumped it in favour of some more obscure psychiatric terminology we don't know (or can't call to mind). | |
| Jun 7, 2011 at 21:46 | comment | added | John Bartholomew | I'd like to note that I am a definitely a layman in this context, but I would always prefer the semantic accuracy of 'closed-minded'. Also, 'closed-minded' seems to be increasing in use at a similar rate to 'close-minded' in the last 15-20 years of your graph, so I wouldn't be so sure it'll be overtaken. | |
| Jun 7, 2011 at 21:38 | history | edited | FumbleFingers | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
deleted 5 characters in body
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| Jun 7, 2011 at 20:08 | comment | added | Callithumpian | @Fumble: No problem. I've yet to use it myself, but I'm working on an edit to my answer that will warrant it! | |
| Jun 7, 2011 at 19:13 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Callithumpian: Thanks for that edit! My very first attempt to use TLDR having only recently discovered it, and I can't even spell it right! Perhaps I should change my handle to Eponymous :-) | |
| Jun 7, 2011 at 18:35 | history | edited | Callithumpian | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
fixed acronym
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| Jun 7, 2011 at 18:26 | history | answered | FumbleFingers | CC BY-SA 3.0 |