Banana Republic
Number of Google results for the following phrases:
“first banana”–92,500
“second banana”–88,200
“third banana”–39,100
“fourth banana”–4,010
“fifth banana”–1,830
“sixth banana”–292
“seventh banana”–522
“eighth banana”–344
“ninth banana”–9,070
“tenth banana”–264
“eleventh banana”–29
“twelfth banana”–40
“thirteenth banana”–270
“fourteenth banana”–10
“fifteenth banana”–617
“sixteenth banana”–113
“seventeenth banana”–110
“eighteenth banana”–57
“nineteenth banana”–3
“twentieth banana”–53
“twenty-first banana”–3
“twenty-second banana”–0
You have to go pretty far down the banana pecking order before getting to “no results found.”
posted 4 January 2010 in Tasty Bits and tagged bananas, Google. 4 comments
January 4th, 2010 at 7:49 pm
That’s funny.
January 4th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
There’s an interesting psychological mini-study in why “fifteenth banana” is so (relatively) popular as a generic term for “person of greatly diminished importance.”
January 5th, 2010 at 8:09 am
“top banana”: 14,300,000. Top Banana laughs at your paltry First Bananas.
January 5th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
371,000 for “top banana” when you put the phrase in quotation marks (meaning it counts only when the words are adjacent to each other, not just on the same page), which is what I did for all the other phrases. But it’s still at the apex of the banana hierarchy.