This entire analysis of what to “learn” from Google Ngram strickes me as deeply misguided… making much out of change in incidence of words over time with no consideration for the self-selection of books published in what was an industry. But the last line of this paragraph…
Among the terms whose frequency escalates after 1960 are caring, nurturing, infant, toddler and childhood. It could be that the truly representative works of this era are novels like Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” all of which feature deep parent-child bonds.
The Road is about parent-child bonding? Did he read The Road? That’s like saying The Bible is the story of how an alien might experience culture clash if it came to earth.
Michael Kevane 