What else do we need to know about ourselves?

Results of a search for the frequency of appearance of the words "self" and "others" in 5,000,000 books written beteen 1500 and 2000.

I picked some fairly meaningless words to check up on (“quahog”), and then decided to try “self” and “others” to see if there was anything in the data. Bingo!

For a description of what Google’s up to here, see The Chronicle of Higher Education.