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…with a fake orange

Donald Trump fake news joke cartoon

Don’t you find it amazing how only last month, the phrase fake news was but non-existent, but now it’s everywhere you go. We’re probably living and breathing the beginnings of a future etymological study over 500 years from now; where etymologists will dive into our popular culture and history to understand what was going on at the time that resulted in the phrase fake news.

And as I stand here today before you in pixel format, I prophesize we’ll see a logarithmic escalation in the use of the term fake news, as captured within tool such as Google Ngrams. If you aren’t aware of this neat little program, it’s an online search engine that charts frequencies of a word or string of words (such as a phrase) as documented within printed sources between 1500 and 2008. Below is the ngram I created for the use of the phrase real news versus fake news. 

Fake news vs real news on Google ngram

Now, let’s sit back and watch fake news rise above and beyond the real news.

PS. If you want to find out a bit more of the serious side to this Google tool, watch the TED talk What we learnt form 5 million books.

 

4 Comments

  • Perpetua says:

    That is hilarious how this fake president turned out to be. Why orange, when he could have been a banana. Tee hee. I suppose the buzz word is ‘fake’. I think the news is being sensationalized Hollywood style or blown out of proportion depending who are they supporting.

    • Marti says:

      Hey Seeker, Your comment reminds me of what I was going to draw a month ago when Donald announced his key cabinet members. I was going to play on words and visuals and draw a bowl of oranges and lemons 🙂

  • Carrie Rubin says:

    It’s frightening to see people believing whatever’s out there without doing any checking to make sure it’s true. They they share it on Facebook where it gets shared again and again. One of the big downsides to our interconnected world, I guess. On the plus side, real news also spreads far and wide quickly. If only we all took the time to sort out one from the other.