Daniel's "Where Slang Comes From"

I think that language is fascinating. Back when I taught developmental, I always liked to teach how babies learn to talk in sort of the same way all across the world. I like regional difference in American English (for example, swearing and regional colloquialisms). So, I really like this research that investigates the rise and fall of slang in America. And I think it could be used in a statistics class.

How to use in class?

1. Funny list of descriptive statistics.

2. Research methodology for using Google searches to answer a question. A good opening for discussion of archival data, data mining, and creating inclusion criteria for research methodology.

3. Using graphs to illustrate trends across time. This feature is interactive.

4. Further interactive features demonstrating how heat maps can be used to demonstrate state-by-state popularity over time. Here, "dank memes" peaked in April 2016 in Montana.

5. The author eye-balled the data can came up with common origins of slang: Hip-hop music, politics, "the internets" (technology). This reminds me, conceptually, of cluster analysis. Note: NO CLUSTER ANALYSIS was conducted to come up with the three slang origin categories.

Comments

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If your students get the joke, they get statistics.

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