From the category archives:

Language

National Grammar Day, Bah Humbug!

March 4, 2010

Evidently today is National Grammar Day.  I am not a fan.
Like most Americans of my generation I was taught to identify parts of speech, diagram sentences and intone with the rest of the class the mysteries of the three-and-twenty most holy helping verbs: “is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been, have, has, had, do, [...]

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Inaugural address words

January 20, 2009

A word cloud made using Wordle, of the texts of all inaugural addresses, from that of April 30th, 1789 until today’s. The 500 most-used words are displayed (leaving out ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘is’, etc.) with font size proportionate to frequency of use.
Some of the least-used words in inaugural addresses, the hapax legomena of inaugural addresses, [...]

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Beautiful Word Clouds

June 26, 2008

We’ve all seen tag clouds by now, the visualization technique that shows the importance (however defined, but typically by prevalence) of a word by assigning a proportionately sized font.
But now comes along a tool that treats these clouds as art. Wordle’s “Beautiful Word Clouds” is quite addictive, allowing you to enter the raw text [...]

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