Chart: the frequency of the collocation 'bolt upright' in fiction

PARLANCE OF THE NOVEL, COMPUTED: The Times has a great piece today on some of the studies conducted to show how certain idiomatic writing styles have become prevalent in fiction, in addition to common collocations in fiction, such as the one below. One with which I'm sure we're all familiar: the immortal 'bolt upright'.

The article explains that the above data is taken from a database called the 'Corpus of Contemporary American English,' which acts as a repository 425 million words of text over two decades of newspaper articles, periodicals, academic dissertations and novels. Read the whole thing.