A lagniappe to yesterday’s post. The Google etymology feature isn’t new–it went live in August, 2013–but it was new to me and I continue to think about it.

I’m struck by how Google continues to work, often in very creative ways, to pique my interest. From the Google Doodle to the What Do You Love? page (go ahead and try it–you’ll find it interesting), they continue to earn my attention, even as I remind myself that they do have a business model and they are not a non-profit. They also manage to reward my intuitions about what they might do next. That’s how I found their etymology affordance last night.

Things get even more interesting when you see the rest of the affordance, portions I didn’t include in last night’s post:

(Ignore the bits from the Online Etymology Dictionary, as these aren’t Google’s work.)

Google’s used their culturomics data (the Ngrams) to yield the usage stats over time. What’s interesting is that the data prompt thought. If these data provide a representative sample (granted, something I cannot tell), I will wonder why the use of certificate has declined steadily since its peak, plateauing for now, while the use of credential has grown suddenly and sharply over the last 20 years or so. One hypothesis might be that “credential” is being used in places where “certificate” might have been used earlier, perhaps because “credential” implies something more prestigious than “certificate.” That’s a chain of suppositions, so not at all reliable, but still perhaps an interesting inquiry project.

If “credential” and “certificate” become synonymous, as I hope they do not but fear they may have already, then the added luster of “credential” will be a cruel illusion indeed.