Hmm. I’m getting different ngram results. I have sheeple at about 1.5 occurrences per billion words presently. There was also this weird blip around 1880, where it was about a third as common as it is now. What the hell was that about?
(The ngrams page was obviously designed by computer people and not data people, so we may never know the answer. Like, what is the context surrounding the words? What is the count as opposed to the frequency? Why the actual fuck is the y axis not in engineering notation?)
I did manage to find the 1945 blip. It was W R Anderson writing the following:
The simple truth is that you can get away with anything, in government. That covers almost all the evils of the time. Once in, nobody, apparently, can turn you out. The People, as ever (I spell it ‘Sheeple’), will stand anything.
