'Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve' Crunches The (Literary) Numbers

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This book (Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve by Ben Blatt) looks very interesting!

I've posted a few excerpts from this article/review. The whole thing is worth checking out, though.

'Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve' Crunches The (Literary) Numbers
March 31, 2017  |  5:07 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition

Let's acknowledge this at the top: It's a thin slice.

To gaze across the great swath of written English over the past few centuries — that teeming, jostling, elbow-throwing riot of characters and places and stories and ideas — only to isolate, with dispassionate precision, some stray, infinitesimal data point such as which author uses cliches like "missing the forest for the trees" the most, would be like ...

Well. You get it. More like missing the forest for the raspberry seed stuck to the underside of the 395th leaf on the 139th branch of the 223,825th tree.

But that's what statistician Ben Blatt's new book, Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve, sets out to do, thin slice by thin slice.

He loaded thousands of books — classics and contemporary best-sellers — into various databases and let his hard drive churn through them, seeking to determine, for example, if our favorite authors follow conventional writing advice about using cliches, adverbs and exclamation points (they mostly do); if men and women write differently (yep); if an algorithm can identify a writer from his or her prose style (it can); and which authors use the shortest first sentences (Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Mark Twain) versus those who use the longest (Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon, Edith Wharton).

MEN WRITE LIKE THIS, BUT WOMEN WRITE LIKE THIS

It tuns out that — sit down for this next bit — authors who are women write equally about men and women, but men write overwhelmingly about men.

I know. I'm shaken, over here.

For every appearance of the word "she" in classics by male authors, Blatt found three uses of the word "he." In classics by women, the ratio was pretty much one-to-one.

Also: Male authors of classic literature are three times as likely to write that a female character "interrupted" than male characters. In contemporary popular and literary fiction, the ratio is smaller, but it's still there.

FAVORITE WORDS

Blatt looked for the specific words that authors use much more frequently than the rate at which those words generally occur in the rest of written English (i.e., compared to a huge sample of literary works — some 385 million words in total — written in English between 1810 and 2009, assembled by linguists at Brigham Young Univeristy).

His criteria: A favorite word -

1. Must occur in at least half of the author's books
2. Must be used at a rate of at least once per 100,000 words
3. Must not be so obscure that it's used less than once per million in the BYU sample of written English
4. Is not a proper noun

Here's some that jumped out at me.

Jane Austen: civility, fancying, imprudence (Story checks out, right?)

Dan Brown: grail, masonic, pyramid (I am sagely nodding, over here.)

Truman Capote: clutter, zoo, geranium

John Cheever: infirmary, venereal, erotic (Boy howdy, that's a whole Cheever short story, right there.)

Agatha Christie: inquest, alibi, frightful

F. Scott Fitzgerald: facetious, muddled, sanitarium

Ian Fleming: lavatory, trouser, spangled ("Pardon me, Blofeld; must dash to the lavatory, got something spangled on me trouser.")

Ernest Hemingway: concierge, astern, cognac (Yuuup.)

Toni Morrison: messed, navel, slop

Vladimir Nabokov: mauve, banal, pun (As Blatt points out, Nabokov had synesthesia, a condition that caused him to associate various colors with the sound and shape of letters and words. "Mauve" was his favorite: He used the word at a rate that's 44 times higher than the rate at which it occurs in the BYU sample of written English.)

Jodi Picoult: courtroom, diaper, diner

Ayn Rand: transcontinental, comrade, proletarian

J.K. Rowling: wand, wizard, potion (Well, duh.)

Amy Tan: gourd, peanut, noodles

Mark Twain: hearted, shucks, satan

Edith Wharton: nearness, daresay, compunction (Man I love me some Edith Friggin' Wharton.)

Virginia Woolf: flushing, blotting, mantelpiece (Chandler Bing: "Could they BE more Virginia Woolf?")

EXCLAMATION POINTS

Well I mean: I hate 'em, at least. My husband uses them like they're powdered sugar and his emails are lemon bars. But I hate 'em.

You know who doesn't hate 'em? Besides my husband, I mean? James Joyce. Dude loved them.

Blatt took a sample of 50 authors of classics and contemporary best-sellers, totaling 580 books. The authors who used the most exclamation points per 100,000 words were:

5. J.R.R. Tolkien (767)
4. E.B. White (782. Gasp; nobody tell Mr. Strunk.)
3. Sinclair Lewis (844. I guess it CAN happen here.)
2. Tom Wolfe (929)
1. James Joyce (1,105)

Elmore Leonard — bless him — used the fewest: Just 49 per 100,000 words.