I've recently become hooked on the TV series Downton Abbey. I'm
not usually one for costume dramas, but the mix of fine acting,
the intriguing social relationships, and the larger WW1-era
story make for compelling viewing. (Also: Maggie Smith is a
treasure.) Despite the widespread criticial acclaim, Downton has
met with criticism for some period-innapropriate uses of
language. For example, at one point Lady Mary laments "losing
the high ground", a phrase that didn't come into use until the
1960s. But is this just a random slip, or are such anachronistic
phrases par for the course on Downton? And how does it compare
to other period productions in its use of language? To answer
these questions, Ben Schmidt (a graduate student in history at
Princeton University and Visiting Graduate Fellow at the
Cultural Observatory at Harvard) created an "Anachronism
Machine". Using the R statistical programming language and
Google n-grams, it analyzes all of the two-word phrases in a
Downton Abbey script, and compares their f