Where’s austerity in everyday speech?

According to Prof. McEnery, people in conversations avoid using words such as “austerity”, only once in a 5 million corpus. Listen to the interview below.

Surprising? Don’t think so. “Expected” words do not crop up when data is examined. We have found that the UK legislation 2007-2011 on immigration does not include the lemma “immigrant” .  Unexpected?