The following article by Chris Tribble discusses the uses of words associated with white in the (Manchester) Guardian Weekly.

Not like the ones we used to know

"I'm dreaming of a white Christmas" is not the seasonal song it once was. For a start, in Britain, climate change seems to have reduced the chances of having a snowy Christmas. Secondly the connotations of some colour words have become complicated.

In fact, "white Christmas" only occurs eight times in the 30m word Guardian Weekly archive. White is instead linked with the centre of US power (White House), legislative processes (white paper), a community in the US (white South), categories of worker and crime (white collar) and white people, farmers, men and owners. And this is in just the top 10. Further analysis shows that white's strongest links also include supremacist and supremacists.

If white is a bit of a problem, is it the same with black? First, black, with 10,178 instances in the corpus, occurs less frequently than white (12,695 - the predominance of White House largely accounts for this contrast).

The words that associate most strongly with black are a different mix too. In the top 15 they are people, Africans, teenager, Americans, men and man (but no women or girls) and empowerment. Other uses include natural phenomena (holes and sea), animal names linked to products or parties (panther, hawk, swan), and two specifically negative phenomena Black Wednesday (Britain's 1992 currency crisis) and black market.

So in this paper, white associates strongly with racism, and black seems to associate with social challenges and social transformations.

So how does a North American newspaper's use of black and white compare? To find out I accessed the excellent Brigham Young University/Time corpus. In more than 80 years of Time magazine the pattern is similar to the Guardian Weekly, with people, men, market, panthers and power figuring high on the associates list for black.

And white? The top five strongest associations are House, supremacist, sidewall (as in white-wall tyre), slavers and surplice (a garment worn by a priest).

Maybe there are more reasons than just climate change to start humming a different tune this Christmas.