Marie-Helene Dubois Oct 15, 2013:

I don't think there's a right or wrong answer in this case. Whether you go for "chopper", "slasher" or "buster" will be a style choice. I must say that I quite like "chopper" because of the alliteration and also because in UK English (which is my flavour of English) uses "get the chop" colloquially to mean someone getting sacked, so context-wise it fits. I would hazard a guess at "buster" being more US English.
I would imagine that your different sets of numbers in corpora could be down to the fact that "job" and "chopper" are likely to come next to each other in other contexts too. I've seen examples such as "the Italian Job chopper chase" or "Job: chopper and chef's aide" etc. whereas this is less likely to occur with "job" next to "slasher", the latter being more uncommon in itself.

SafeTex (asker) Oct 14, 2013:

Concerning Brechen's reference Hello

Can anyone understand the following please.

I added 'job chopper' to Google Fight and it got more results than 'job slasher' (9,350,000 v 345,000)

As I speak British English and no one had suggested 'job chopper', I was curious to see if it is in fact an British collocation so I went over to Diatopix

The results in relative value per million Google pages?

job chopper job slasher
Canada 0 0
USA 0 0
UK 1 0
Ireland 0 98
Australia 1 1
New Zealand 0 97


I'm I going stupid cos the results seem completely opposed in terms of usage.

The first site seems to be saying that 'job chopper' is around 30 times more common while the second site says job slasher is about a 100 times more common (and only really occurs in two countries to boot).

Can anyone make sense of this?

Thanks