Friday, December 17, 2010

"Faceless Bureaucrat"

Via Kevin Drum, the Google Ngram Viewer. It's a database of text from Google Books together with software which searches and graphs the occurrence of a phrase. The phrase, "faceless bureaucrat" first appears around 1958.  Usage rises steadily from 1964 to the 1980's, then has been up and down but mostly up since then. I wonder what was driving the usage.  Anyhow, as Kevin says, it's a great time waster and the NY Times says it's been used for a scholarly paper.

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