Things have been frantic around here lately. Mostly, I’ve been busy reviewing the proofs of The Book, of which more soon, but I’ve also written a pair of articles for other publications, both of which were a lot of fun to address.
Let’s try an experiment. If we start with some large body of text — post-war American novels, say, or twentieth-century British newspapers — and count all the occurrences of all the words in those texts, we can put together a fairly accurate list of the most popular words in English. The word “the” would be at the top, followed by “of” and then “and”. With this list of word counts in hand, you could turn to any other similar body of work — British novels or American newspapers, for example — and have a good idea of how often you’d expect to find each of the words on your list. Simple enough.