February192008
what is your favorite author’s favorite word?
In David Lodge’s 1984 novel, ”Small World,” a literature professor fond of computer programming presents a novelist with a fantastic discovery: by entering all the novelist’s books into a computer, the professor can determine the novelist’s favorite word. The computer knows to ignore the mortar of sentences — articles, prepositions, pronouns — to get to ”the real nitty-gritty,” Lodge writes, ”words like love or dark or heart or God.” But the computer’s conclusion causes the novelist to shrink from ever writing again. His favorite word, it finds, is ”greasy.”
Two decades later, Amazon.com, improving on its popular ”search inside the book” function, in April introduced a concordance program, whereby a click of the mouse reveals a book’s most frequently occurring words, ”excluding common words.” Further clicks reveal their contexts.
(@ NYT)
