Thank goodness there’s nothing to cover on the beaver news feed this morning, because I recently came across a fascinating tool that I wanted to share with you. It started because we were innocently wondering about the phrase “Busy as a beaver” for obvious reasons. When was did it start being used and when was it used less?
We 
were curious because just as many people also say “Busy as a bee“, and the way my particular mind works at the moment I wondered whether the phrase interchange had anything at all to do with the fur trade, and beaver extinction. Did the usage disappear, for example, when it stopped being common knowledge to know the manner in which a beaver worked? And did busy as a bee take over because we still had bees? I’m sure there used to be phrases describing things we were once likely to see every day that dropped out of common use when technology or habit made them obsolete – like iceboxes or parafin.
So idly thinking this I stumbled on the Google Books NGRAM viewer. This searches the text of all the books entered on google and gives you a lovely graph about their occurrence. You can chose the language or the time period according to your interests. Our mystery phrase “Busy as a Beaver” looks something like this:
Bear with me here, but I think even with this silly rough tool you can see that the phrase ‘Busy as a beaver” was in strong use at the height of the East Coast fur trade in 1790, and then dropped off when they ran out of beavers until the 1830’s when the fur trade was driven west and found a new treasure trove to raid. Once they wiped at all those too it was used rarely for a long time, until the late thirties when beaver reintroduction started to make the furry little metaphors easier to see.
Is there a growing field of ecological linguistics? If there isn’t there should be. This was stunning to actually see on paper. Out of curiosity I also checked the results for “Busy as a Bee.” Jon thought this phrase might have been more 
English and maybe a more thorough analysis would establish this, but the crazy thought that popped into my head when I saw this is that it was pretty much the opposite as the beaver. So maybe when there were no beavers left to be as busy as, maybe they thought about bees more. And maybe when we kill off all the bees with our neonicotinoids they will come up with a brand new phrase entirely?
Here’s what they look like together because I’m just like that:
I made cards to announce the Beaver Festival yesterday for our next couple events and wanted to add something on the back. I thought this was appropriate.
