Assume you have some question or problem about English.
STEP 1: With whatever knowledge you have, guess an answer as best you can.
STEP 2: Now, go to books.google.com and run searches based on your guess. See if you can confirm or disprove the guess. If you guessed that a certain word or phrase is obsolete, restrict the search to only recent years, in “advanced book search”. If your guess seems to be spot-on, delve deeper into the search results and see whether it still seems that way. If your guess is that a word is only used in certain regions or countries, see whether the search results confirm that or disprove it. And so on.
The overall goal here should be to try to disprove your guess. Your guess is almost certainly wrong, just because language is so wonderfully complex, but you might be guessing pretty close to the truth. If you can find evidence against your guess, that’ll allow you to refine your guess and make it better.
STEP 3: If you’re confident that the guess is close enough for your purposes, you’re now done. Otherwise, go back to Step 1 and repeat the whole process.
Researching English on books.google.com
