A Meditation upon Things in which I will briefly speak of the Icelandic Parliament, “creature features” of the 1960’s, Cicero, Duke Ellington, Shakespeare and excessive pedantry. The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a short piece by James R. Hagerty that raised my ire: “Use More Expressive Words!” Teachers Bark, Beseech, Implore. The article describes teachers […]
Language
Eldnar Randle: Did he know?
Eldnar Randle was born in Delano, California in 1892 and died in 1973 in Oregon. For most of his working years he was an auto mechanic. But he shared a distinction shared by only 1 in over 700,000 Americans. Any guesses? A clue: Look closely at his name. Yes, Eldnar Randle was given a palindromic […]
The Words Democrats and Republicans Use
It came to me after listening to the State of the Union Address: Can we tell whether a speech was from a Democrat or a Republican President, purely based on metrics related to the words used? It makes sense that we could. After all, we can analyze emails and detect spam that way. Automatic text […]
National Grammar Day, Bah Humbug!
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, […]
Inaugural address words
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, […]