Saturday, August 07, 2004

Random Internet Stuff, and Grammar Rant

The Christian Science Monitor calls www.wordcount.org "A great way to waste time." I wouldn't call it waste. WordCount has indexed 86,800 words in the English language and ranked them according to frequency of usage in a representative sample of writings. It says some intruguing things about us.

Not surprisingly, "the" ranks #1, and nothing in the top 50 is likely to surprise anyone; they're all the "little" words--articles, pronouns, conjunctions--whose purposes lean more toward the grammatical rather than conveying the values of our culture. Incidentally, "I" outranks "you" by about 3 slots. We are a self-absorbed species. However, we are optimistic (#6133, whereas "pessimistic" is all the way down at 13,411) since "hope" is up at #543 and "dream" is at #2,167. "Love" is at #384, while "hate" is knocked down to #3107.

My campaign for the correct usage of "hopefully" may have some effect, since it is all the way down at #4,470. Next up: abolishing the phrase "a myriad of." Myriad ranks 15,542nd, and I see it used correctly about 1 in every 15,542 times. For the record, "myriad" is a noun meaning "10,000," not an adjective meaning an indefinite but large quantity.

Star Wars fans take note: Jedi made the list at #82,066.

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