Archive for the 'Linguistics' Category

Word Play

August 15th, 2008

The other day I happened to come across a nifty new feature on the data sharing site “Many Eyes” called “Wordles”. As you may know from my last post, I’ve already written about Many Eyes before (here and here) as well as another data sharing site, Swivel, here.

But Wordles are something new: highly customizable tag clouds. Many Eyes already has tag cloud functionality, of course; I was an especially big fan of their tag cloud comparsion tool. But tag clouds don’t have the best reputation. Some people outright hate them. And the people at Many …

Front Loaded

February 1st, 2008

A few months ago I wrote about video games titles. I tried to see what words were popular in video game titles and what weren’t. Sometimes, though, I wonder about other aspects of titles. Anybody’s who’s ever lookeed in a phone book has no doubt noticed businesses that start with earlier letters of the alphabet on purpose. (Though supposedly this doesn’t help those businesses much. Sorry, AAAAAAdvantage Plumbing.)

I think this applies to names of people, too. Take a look at this graph, so that you can see what I mean. “A” is the most …

Fortune Favors the Prepared, Part Two

January 18th, 2008

(Last week I wrote about general trends in fortune cookies, and the fortunes they contained. You don’t necessarily need to have read that post to understand this one, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate the content more if you have.)

This week’s post is the second part in a two-part series I’m doing about fortune cookies. This time around, I’ll be discussing the specifics of the fortunes I read.

As I said before, fortunes come in 3 basic flavors: Compliments, Advice, and Predictions (though there were a few weird fortunes that didn’t fit in those categories, or any other from what …

Fortune Favors the Prepared, Part One

January 11th, 2008

(This week’s post is part one of two on fortune cookies. As with my two part series on Everybody Votes, this week will be general observations on fortune cookies, while next week will be more specific.)

Fortune cookies have always intrigued me. It’s not for any rational reason, really; I’ve just always had a soft spot for them, I guess. Maybe it’s the idea of a dessert that appeals to more than your sweet tooth, or maybe it’s because they try to say something meaningful to a total stranger in two sentences or less. Or perhaps …

Feeling Chatty

November 30th, 2007

Everyone knows people speak differently in online chat than they do in person, or even in emails. (Except for those people who say stuff like “LOL” in person. I’m afraid there’s no hope for y’all.) The question is, how much do we speak differently in chat?

A quick Google search of mine didn’t turn up much. I mostly found stuff about what chat acronyms mean and search engine optimization and the like. (Try getting anything meaningful out of a search for “ROFL”. Go ahead, I dare you.) I did have another source of data …

What’s in a Name?

July 17th, 2007

If you’ve played any amount of video games in your lifetime, you probably know first-hand that some of them have some pretty weird titles, especially the old ones. Which got me to thinking: “I wonder if there’s any pattern to it?” That is, are there any interesting patterns in old video game names?

I collected data for six (mostly older) systems. They are:

- Gameboy and Gameboy Color (GB)
- Gameboy Advance (GBA)
- Genesis
- Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
- Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)
- Turbo Graphix 16 (TG16)

This is what I found:

System
Title Count
Words (avg)
Words (median)
Words (max)
Std Dev

GBA
404
3.69
3
11
1.64

SNES
733
3.24
3
9
1.70

GB
846
3.21
3
10
1.63

Genesis
437
3.19
3
9
1.69

NES
733
2.81
2
9
1.58

TG16
97
2.40
2
8
1.36

Total …