More on word frequencies of 'habit' and 'routine'

A little more fooling around with google's Ngram tool produced this interesting plot of frequencies of the phrases 'my habit', 'our habit', 'my routine', and 'our routine', from 1800-2000 in their sample of one million English books.

  
   



I chose these search phrases out of interest in whether 'habit' and 'routine' differ historically in their individual or collective connotations. The interesting result is that 'habit' has more often been mine than ours, while routine has more often been ours than mine. I take this as a suggestion that the collective connotation is stronger for 'routine' and the individual one is stronger for 'habit', though each clearly has a substantial frequency in its «minority» connotation.

This link, http://tinyurl.com/habit-routine , will let you reproduce the query, examine specific examples of the usage from different eras, and try other queries.