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Jeopardy N-Grams Lyrics by James Somers

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J-Grams allows you to watch trends come and go. Let’s dig in.
There are always alarmists who believe our best days are behind us. This graph will not assuage their fears:
This graph shows how frequently the terms “Abraham Lincoln” and “iPod” have appeared in Jeopardy! clues from 1985 to today.
One can’t be sure of what Honest Abe would make of being matched, and, by the looks of it, soon usurped, by the iPod on Jeopardy!. Probably he would call it a sign of the times. We seem to be less interested these days in the old than in the new:
We're also apparently losing our religion:
Before we get carried away, lamenting some uniquely “millennial” decline, we should keep in mind that lighter entertainment has always dominated on Jeopardy!:
It has always been a family show:
So it’s not actually clear that Jeopardy! has turned its back on a more serious past. Breaking down the centuries, you find that it’s actually the 1800s that earn the most mentions on the show:
As for this century, Boomers win—we’re still most obsessed with the sixties:
As soon as J-Grams was born, my first instinct was to go searching for familiar names and toys and TV shows from the past. There’s something about a tool like this that breeds nostalgia.
As it turns out, the show itself is nostalgic too. Fads that appeared and quickly faded actually became fodder for Jeopardy! clues many years later. There’s a clear pattern: a short-lived high hump of excitement, a dormant period and then a nostalgic resurgence.
One wonders whether the same thing will happen to, say, some of the great television of the mid-90s, like “Home Improvement,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” and “Family Matters.” Are we just now in the fallow period, awaiting a nostalgic callback?
Of course, some things might be best left behind, and there is evidence that they will be:
The top three U.S. colleges in 2014 according to the U.S. News & World Report are Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, in that order. But any bright high school senior deciding between the three should think twice before heading to New Jersey. Because in the world that matters—the world of references on Jeopardy!—the clear favorite would actually be Harvard, by a factor of almost 3 to 1:
By 1985, VHS and Betamax were still competing, though it seemed as though the latter was on its last legs. If you’d looked at the Jeopardy! clues from that year, you would have seen the writing on the wall:
It’s worth asking: Are there any technologies today that are similarly doomed, but we just don’t know it yet? Can Jeopardy! clues predict the future?
In a world of ascendant tech companies, the old king, Microsoft, seems to be on its way out—at least in the land of Trebek.
Of course, sometimes Jeopardy! seems out of touch. For instance, even though video games are a $70 billion industry, to the film industry’s $95 billion, Jeopardy! gives them short shrift:
Jeopardy!’s clues are carefully curated. And so to the extent that they offer a distorted picture of our world, you’d expect that picture to be distorted in a good way: overly intellectual, neutral and open-minded, something like a quiz show Pleasantville. But sometimes they do no better than the real world:
Good and bad, old and new—there is plenty more where this came from. Try J-Grams yourself and see what you can uncover!
Credits
James Somers

James Somers

About “Jeopardy N-Grams” by James Somers

Read the complete lyrics to "Jeopardy N-Grams" by James Somers. On Lyrks you can follow along with the full text, explore the artist's discography, and discover related songs. The track is often categorized under Non-Music.

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