Learn One Thing A Day

Thanks to my dear friend Sylvia, today I leant the meaning of the word "paraprosdokian"! A Paraprosdokian (from Greek: " against expectation ") is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected, and generally humorous. Some are close to oxymoros, another figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. Here is a list of nice paraprosdokians provided by Sylvia! 1. Where there's a will, I want to be in it. 2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still on my list. 3. Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak. 4. If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong. 5. We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public. 6. War does not determine who is right -- only who is left. 7. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. 8. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from m...

Today I wanna talk you about Google Ngram Viewer http://books.google.com/ngrams A very, very valuable tool from Google! First of all .. what is a n-gram ? According to wikipedia : In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text or speech. An n-gram could be any combination of letters. However, the items in question can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or base pairs according to the application. The n-grams typically are collected from a text or speech corpus. So basically, a word is an  n-gram of size 1 (or unigram )  while " I am " is an n-gram of size 2 (or  bigram ), " the view is awesome " is an ngram of size 4 and so on... Now that you know what a ngram is let's see what Google Ngram can do for us. When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases (the ngrams )  have occurred in a corpus...