Of course I began, like a schoolboy with his first dictionary, looking up all the words that used to be called 'dirty'. After that amusement died down (why is there a near 20 year gap in the peaks between fellatio and cunnilingus in English books? Maybe that sparked the woman's movement after all), I moved on to more serious issues.
I switched the search to French books and entered the phrase indépendance du Québec and there was a marked drop in interest after the 1980 and 1985 neverendums with the occurrence for 2005 about equal to 1968 and still trending down. One can't read too much into these numbers. We don't know if all of the Québec literature has been scanned for the past few years, for example, and perhaps the database for recent years is France biased. Perhaps we need to try this again in 3 years to see where we were at, er, today.
Or, replace the word indépendance with souveraineté, and you'll get quite a different result (an exercise for the reader) due to shifting language of the land when selling the idea needed a softer language. But still, since about 1995, the decline in the literature remains.
With an aging population, immigration and the success of various liberty reducing laws in Québec, perhaps it is true that L'indépendance est morte.
Important note: for the above it is critical that spelling be accurate, to the inclusion of accents.
