Ben Zimmer introduces the COCA project:
...the Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA, which brings together 425 million words of text from the past two decades, with equally large samples drawn from fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts and transcripts of spoken English. The fiction samples cover short stories and plays in literary magazines, along with the first chapters of hundreds of novels from major publishers. The compiler of COCA, Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, has designed a freely available online interface that can respond to queries about how contemporary language is used. Even grammatical questions are fair game, since every word in the corpus has been tagged with a part of speech.
Just for fun, I searched "problematic," and note a few examples:
The debates that continue over pornography and open relationships are driven less by positive or negative attitudes toward sexual satisfaction per se than by differing views of how sexual satisfaction relates to everything else in life. And this is where Savage's ethics make their most problematic claims - by separating and elevating sexual satisfaction above other things people value. "Rules of Misbehavior," Washington Monthly, March/April, 2011
LOVE: Your impulsive behavior is okay for now, but may be problematic over the long term. Start talking it out. Horoscope, March 2011
nd now reactor number four seems to be going in the direction of number one. It looks like, you know that every reactor now four of the six are very problematic. SMITH: Well, they are very problematic. -- Hannity, March 15, 2011
Success was less important than resolve. Success was transient and problematic, resolve was a way of existing. Richard Stern, "In a Word, Trowbridge," Antioch Review, 1990
She didn't mind being alone, and she kept thinking fondly of her suddenly widowed aunt Helen, who had jaunted off to Europe alone when getting a refund on the trip she'd planned with her husband proved to be problematic. Aunt Helen had the adventure of her life.
MR-LEHRER: How do you come down on this current controversy that exists on some college campuses about racial slurs and that kind of thing, anti-semitic statements, et cetera? MR-PERKINS: That's a very problematic area in my mind.
The number of patrols, by foot or vehicle, was increased in general, the IDF preferred to operate in larger formations, particularly in populated areas, in order to deter disturbances. Problematic villages were subjected to large-scale raids.
Susan Miller's Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition examines the historical and political contexts of composition and its problematic relationship to literature.
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