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Wednesday, December 29, 2010

More Ngram fun: carrots and sticks

Carrot and stick, or carrot on a stick? In my last go-round with this one -- when I found "turnips on a stick" in the 1840s -- I decided they might well be two independent creations, rather than an original and a variant. Michael Quinion also covers the issue pretty exhaustively at World Wide words. And here's the Google graph, showing that "carrot and stick," if no more respectable than its stablemate, is a lot more common.

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2 comments:

  1. Bryan WhiteDecember 30, 2010 at 5:07 PM

    Are we talking about the idea of the carrot in front and the stick behind, the combination of reward and punishment?

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  2. The Ridger, FCDJanuary 9, 2011 at 9:16 PM

    It is two different things: the carrot-in-front-stick-behind (carrot and stick) or the carrot-on-a-stick-perpetually-dangling-in-front-and-out-of-reach (carrot on stick). This has to make the debate... tricky.

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