In 1981, the short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver was published.  It’s awesome, but I think at this point everyone knows that.  (Less well-known fact: Carver’s poetry is pretty good, too…)  Anyhow, the beginning of that phrase is used as a kind of set-frame/conventionalization you see around places.  A snowclone, dontchaknow…  Like “X is the new Y” or the however many words for snow, dontchaknow.

Point being, I came across “What we talk about when we talk about Variation” in a syllabus for a class I’m taking, and I got to wondering about when this particular phrase came into usage, basically whether Carver was the first person to use it and it grew from  there, or if it was already a thing in 1981.  Because the internet is gigantic and awesome, someone has already wondered about this on the snowclone database, which person also guesses it starts with Carver.  Helpfully, there’s also a list of a wide variety of things we talk about when we talk about at The Awl.

I started with the Google ngram viewer, but it doesn’t work for strings as long as I needed, so just for kicks I searched for a bunch of substrings of the string in question, just to see.  It’s not very helpful, but you can click on it anyways.

I  did a regular Google search next.  The intuition is partly confirmed by the auto-complete results:

Searching for the phrase (in quotes) “What we talk about when we talk about” gets 1.7 million hits.  Adding love to the quotes slims the results down to 434k, which I found pretty surprising.  Anyhow, the next step was searching for “what we talk about when we talk about” -“what we talk about when we talk about love”.  Excluding the full phrase with love, rather than just excluding the word love by itself was necessary for examples like this, which incidentally include the word love.  When you do that search, which theoretically should find all the things we talk about when we’re not talking about love, you get 89k results.  This leads to a mystery- where are the ~1.2 million results that aren’t talking about love but are talking about something?  I don’t know, but what I do know is that Google gets a little confused when you ask it to do work on big strings.

Another thing I do know?  I actually have things to do today, so I’m not going to keep trying to find the  first use today, I basically just needed somehting to occupy myself while I waited for some software to download.  Which now has.  Okay bye!