blogging on teen follies

Sat Dec 16 22:45:17 UTC 2006

On Dec 16, 2006, at 1:34 PM, Jon Lighter wrote:

> Thanks, Arnold. That's terrific - I mean, estimable !
>
>   So we have before us - in black and white - proof that most
> persons in responsible positions must rely on about twenty words
> for roughly one-third of their utterances - the same twenty words
> used by inarticulate, music-benumbed teenagers !

not, i suspect *quite* the same list ("yeah", for example, isn't in
the Brown top 20), though mostly the same, and not *quite* in the
same order (though very similar).

in my own earlier posting on this on Language Log, i was hoping,
somewhat desperately, that the results reported were not just Zipf's
Law as applied to teenage vocabulary, but, alas, so it seems to be.

arnold

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