1) Those of you not connected to me on Facebook or Twitter may not have gotten a reminder of late that I have been writing a weekly column at KCET, the Los Angeles public TV station’s website. They show up every Wednesday at 10 AM Los Angeles time, more or less, and you can see the list of my past commentaries here. Today’s piece is on discussion of handing California’s State Parks over to off-roaders. You heard me.

It’s always helpful — to me and to KCET — if you pass the posts around: link to them, Tweet/Fbook/Tumblr them, email them to your mom, comment on them, what have you. As Southern Californians know, KCET has gone through a lot of changes in the past few years, not all of them pleasant ones, but hiring LAist’s Zach Behrens away to run their website was kinda brilliant. Zach, aside from being a good soul, has a vision for the site that’s pretty compelling, reporting on culture, politics, environment and everything else within the reach of the station. (Which covers a lot of ground.) I’m stoked to be part of it.

2) I stumbled across this post by Ed Yong this morning. It’s a fascinating profile of Erez Lieberman Aiden, a brilliant polymath who puts me in mind of Tom Lehrer’s line about Mozart. The post is one of those that’s worth reading for any number of reasons: the reminder about breaking out of comfort zones, the observations about the salutary effects of failure, and the fact that it’s written by Ed Yong, which makes most things worth reading right there. But Ed included an almost throwaway link to Google’s Ngram viewer, which allows you to search Google’s gigantic Books archive for words and phrases, then charts the number of occurrences of each phrase by the year in which the book was printed.

I immediately thought of the Joshua tree book chapter I’m stuck on, namely the one about the name of the tree. I’ve written about the canonical naming story here before, both to debunk the canon and subsequently to debunk my own debunking of the canon.

Short version: The canon holds that the Mormons named the tree. According to Wikipedia’s version:

The name Joshua tree was given by a group of Mormon settlers who crossed the Mojave Desert in the mid-19th century. The tree’s unique shape reminded them of a Biblical story in which Joshua reaches his hands up to the sky in prayer.

There are many variations of the story, some of them implausible. But for a long time, I’d suspected that they were all spurious. It took me a while to document any use of the name during the period in which the Mormon pioneers were gallivanting around the Mojave. When I wrote this, I still hadn’t found any.

Within a few months, though, I found reliable documentation that the tree was referred to as “The Joshua” as early as 1875 in that part of its range that overlapped with the Mormon settlements in southwestern Utah. Still, it seemed that people in Arizona and California didn’t start calling the tree by its present common name until much later.

So when Ed inadvertently called the Ngrams doohickey to my attention, I had to try it out.

This is a graph of the frequency with which four phrases appear in Google Books’ entire library. The phrases are “Joshua tree” (in blue), “Yucca brevifolia” (red), “yucca palm” (green), and Yucca arborescens (yellow.) “Yucca palm” was a common name for the Joshua tree in California and Arizona, and presumably elsewhere. “Yucca arborescens” is an obsolete formal name for the tree. As you can see, “yucca palm” was the most-often-used common name for the tree in those books Google has catalogued from its first appearance in 1875 until about 1910, after which the phrase “Joshua tree” — which doesn’t even register here until 1886 — beats it rather unambiguously into the ground. Within just a couple years it seemed familiar to the point of use beyond explanation in Nevada and in California. At the outset of “Joshua tree’s” leap to popularity, in 1910, California botanist Willis Linn Jepson felt obliged to point out that “tree yucca” was the more commonly used name in California. Within a couple of years that was no longer true. For what it’s worth, here’s a comparison of “tree yucca” with the other two common names. Many other yuccas were referred to as “tree yuccas” in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and not all of them were really tree-like: Hesperoyucca whipplei, for one.

What caused the sudden growth in popularity? Not sure. Some of it may be an artifact of publishing trends in the 1920s, or of Google’s ability to acquire books to scan. Certainly using printed matter as a way of sampling folk linguistics puts the data at a remove: someone has to decide to write about it before it gets documented. What’s more, there are certain — shall we say — concerns about the accuracy of some of Google’s metadata.

I now have more work to do. Still, interesting, and how cool is it that I got there via a link from an article on the serendipitous aspects of research?