Gazing upon the waters of the deep

I read through the book and a lot of the advice was remarkably timely.

(I’ve been experimenting with reading older books and books written by people who have done something of value. I imagine P.T. Barnum accumulated a lot of life lessons about how to draw people’s attentions and make money.

I was right. He was a clever man).

There’s a couple interesting tidbits from the book. P.T. talks about focusing on your health because it’s hard to do anything when you feel like shit. Talks about not getting into debt. Standard stuff. (I wouldn’t recommend it. Not because it’s bad, but because I don’t like to recommend books. I think you should pick the problems you want to solve yourself.)

What most interested me from the book was the use of the word “firmament.” I don’t see that word much anymore.

I’ve been trying to figure out why that could be. It makes me wonder about why certain words fall out of usage. Surely, people still dream of Heaven.

So I did some research on Google Ngram. It’s a site where you can look up the occurrence of specific words and phrases in books.

The years 1851 to 1852 seemed to be the height of “firmament”, followed by a steady decline. I’m not sure why.

For context, it seems like America was going through some regional crisis’ during the 1850s. Northern and Southern states were growing some hostility towards each other over the issue of slavery, but I don’t think that would’ve led to a precipitously decrease in the use of “firmament” because it’s fundamentally a religious term.

Maybe populations were beginning to intermingle and “firmament” just got lost in the war of the words. Maybe that word lacked the kind of “compressibility” that the word “heaven” had (“heaven” is certainly much easier to pronounce than “firmament”).

On the other hand, when I looked up the word “heaven”, it didn’t fare much better.

So maybe the decrease in “firmament” reflects an overall lack of interest in religion. Maybe just stopped believing as much anymore.

But if that was true, one might think “science” came in to fill the void left after the death of God. That doesn’t seem to be the case either though. The usage of “science” seems more or less cyclical. It doesn’t seem like people suddenly rushed towards science as the guiding philosophy for their life.

But “politics” saw a huge boon.

(I wouldn’t take any of these graphs too seriously. I’m mostly just wandering, trying to get a sense of how American life has evolved, and I don’t quite have the tools to grasp it all yet.)

Still, it’s interesting.

Did we replace the idea of God with the State?

Maybe.

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