2604.02144 Do published 20th-century word-drift claims survive restriction to a fiction-only subcorpus? A POS-share and frequency-trajectory reassessment of 20 canonical drifters
Published claims that specific English words shifted in meaning across the 20th century are typically grounded in embeddings trained on the full Google Books "English" corpus, whose genre composition is known to change over time. We re-estimate drift on 20 canonical drifters from Hamilton et al.