ether vs slur

ether

verb
  • To viciously humiliate or insult. 

noun
  • The sky, the heavens; the void, nothingness. 

  • Starting fluid. 

  • Diethyl ether (C₄H₁₀O), an organic compound with a sweet odour used in the past as an anaesthetic. 

  • The medium breathed by human beings; the air. 

  • A particular quality created by or surrounding an object, person, or place; an atmosphere, an aura. 

  • Any of a class of organic compounds containing an oxygen atom bonded to two hydrocarbon groups. 

  • The atmosphere or space as a medium for broadcasting radio and television signals; also, a notional space through which Internet and other digital communications take place; cyberspace. 

  • Often as aether and more fully as luminiferous aether: a substance once thought to fill all unoccupied space that allowed electromagnetic waves to pass through it and interact with matter, without exerting any resistance to matter or energy; its existence was disproved by the 1887 Michelson–Morley experiment and the theory of relativity propounded by Albert Einstein (1879–1955). 

slur

verb
  • To insult or slight. 

  • To run together; to articulate poorly. 

  • To play legato or without separate articulation; to connect (notes) smoothly. 

  • To soil; to sully; to contaminate; to disgrace. 

  • To cover over; to disguise; to conceal; to pass over lightly or with little notice. 

  • To cheat, as by sliding a die; to trick. 

noun
  • In knitting machines, a device for depressing the sinkers successively by passing over them. 

  • An insinuation or innuendo. 

  • An act of running one's words together; poor verbal articulation. 

  • A mark, stain, or smear; (by extension) a slight occasion of reproach. 

  • A disparaging insult or slight, particularly one used to denigrate a specific group. 

  • A set of notes that are played legato, without separate articulation. 

  • The symbol indicating a legato passage, written as an arc over the slurred notes (not to be confused with a tie). 

How often have the words ether and slur occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )