Reading (as one does) John Maidment's
Blog[1] to while away the idle hours between dinner and bed-time, I came across (for the first time) the Google Ngram Viewer -- an analytical tool that scans a vast corpus of printed books for instances of a given word (case-sensitive) over time. Ecstatic, I threw "BIR" at it, and the results can be seen
here. What we can deduce from this is unclear, but there is a marked peak in usage in around 1974. Why, I am forced to wonder, does the major peak in its usage coincide with the the year which marked (some might assert) the beginning of the end of the glories of the pre-Patak's BIR era ?
** Phil.
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[1] Just in case you think JAM is interested only in words, language and linguistics, you might like to read his
recipe for Spicy Tomato Rasam.