Language Log, a group log housed on the UPenn computer science servers, and headed by a linguist and CS professor at UPenn, is great for things like a brief history and usage of insults ending with -ball. After the history, there's

The Xy → Xball is not foolproof, though: silly doesn't yield *sillball, presumably because sill is not a morpheme here. And in general polysyllabic insults don't take -ball. [...] [I]t seems totally implausible to refer to someone as an idiotball -- or a bastardball or an a**holeball either. In contrast, polysyllabic nouns for nasty substances seem plausible as a base. Thus mucousball ought to work, it seems to me, even though it's not to be found in Google's index. Corpus linguistics still has some limitations, I guess.

I don't really have a lot to say about sketchballs, but I do think it's interesting that Liberman verifies most of his arguments for the validity or invalidity of a word by "argument from Google results count." It seems that the fact that this is a reasonable thing to do is pretty obvious to everyone who's thought even a little about computational linguistics. For me personally, it's one of those projects I always wanted to sit down and give a long, hard thought to, but I never did. More specifically, I wanted to use Google as part of a language generation tool, as a way to quantify the probabilty of a person using an automatically generated phrase.

Maybe one day.

On a related note, via AI-Complete, here's a neat looking paper called automatic meaning discovery using Google.

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