Stan Carey’s post yesterday was a nice reminder of how a word or phrase can suddenly gain widespread currency simply as a result of fashion. And as with any trend, the kudos gained by the user declines in inverse proportion to the number of users – so that in the end the phrase becomes an overused cliché which discerning speakers avoid because they don’t want to sound like everyone else. So fit for purpose may already have passed its peak. As Stan observed, it is too recent to be found in older corpora. The British National Corpus (collected in the early 1990s) has only two examples of the phrase, where it is used in its original legal sense, referring to items sold to the public: these must – under the UK’s Sale of Goods Act – be ‘fit for purpose’. But the big corpus we use now at Macmillan Dictionaries has 1726 hits for this expression, and most refer to organizations, systems, and even people.

This raises questions about the reliability of our language data – the raw materials from which we make the dictionary – in cases where language is changing fast. For the last 25 years or so, linguists and lexicographers have been using corpus data to learn about the behaviour of words and the way the language system works. But an exciting new research area is opening up, based not on conventional corpora, but on Twitter feeds.

These have the advantage of providing high volumes of very up-to-date examples of language in use. Some of this data is used for what is known as ‘sentiment analysis’, as a way of discovering people’s attitudes on various topics, and tweets have even been used (with some success) to predict the movement of the stock market.  But this material can be used for linguistic research too. One interesting project is looking at differences in language use between men and women. By analysing millions of Twitter messages where the writer can be reliably categorised as male or female, the researchers are able to compare the way particular words or phrases are used. They have produced a website where you can key in words and compare their frequency according to the gender of the writer. Try looking, for example, at these four words of enthusiastic approval, to see which are used more by women and which are favoured by men: lovely, great, brilliant, fabulous.

The ‘detailed query’ function also lets you see how words typically combine. The adjective gorgeous, for example, is used almost three times as often by women as by men – but when men do use it, the nouns it most often modifies are woman and girl, whereas women tend to use gorgeous to describe things like dresses, pictures, and views. I’m not sure what to make of that, but I expect someone will have a theory!

Samuel Johnson famously said that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. This is sometimes misquoted as “when a man is bored with London, he is bored with life” (and sometimes wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde, but that’s another story). But what the great lexicographer definitely didn’t say was “when a man is bored of London, he is bored of life”.

Look in any dictionary and you will find that the “correct” preposition to use with bored is with. No one mentions bored of (not even hot-off-the-press books like the 2009 edition of Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English). Yet, whatever purists may think about it, our language data shows that, in 2009, more people say bored of than bored with. How has this happened?

For many years, the best electronic resource for observing English in use was the British National Corpus (BNC) – a digital collection of books, newspapers, recorded conversations, and much else, covering the widest possible range of subject matter in both “imaginative” (fictional) and “informative” media. When it launched in 1993, the BNC – with 100 million words of text – was at the cutting edge of language technology. Though still an excellent corpus, the BNC has been overtaken in sheer scale by the corpora we use now (typically containing about 2 billion words) and of course by the Web itself – an almost infinite reservoir of language data. This means we can analyse, in great detail, what people actually write and say when they communicate with one another (as opposed to asking them what they think they say or telling them what we think they should say).

And what does this data tell us? In the BNC (whose texts span the period roughly from 1975 to 1992), there are 246 instances of bored with, and just 10 hits for bored of. The sources are revealing, too: about half the bored of citations come from informal conversations, like this excerpt:

I reckon they should do tea here, I’m getting really bored of coffee I tell you.

The rest are from magazines like The Face (now sadly defunct) and the New Musical Express – texts aimed at a young readership, and often a good place to look for emerging language trends. So as recently as 1993, bored of was a rarity. As it happens, I touched on all this in an article written back in 2003, and noted there some figures from a Google search (Google, remember, was still in its infancy at that point): Google found 112,000 instances of bored of, but bored with still held a comfortable lead with about 340,000. Not so today: try a Googlefight pitting bored of against bored with and bored of is now narrowly in front.

There’s a possible distractor here in the phrase “Bored of the Rings”, which surfaces in various parodies of Tolkien’s well-known trilogy – there is a book of this name, a movie, a fansite and even an entry in Wikipedia. So let’s try a search that rules this out: bored of it vs. bored with it. This time the version using “with” maintains a slender lead, but this is unlikely to last. If you listen out, you’ll hear that most people under 35 say bored of – presumably by analogy with tired of – and it can’t be denied that this is, phonologically speaking, less hard work: bored of trips off the tongue more easily. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for “of” to be recognised, first as an acceptable alternative to “with”, and (eventually, no doubt) as the standard preposition to use in these circumstances.