One happy language!

[Ben Zimmer]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> >Overall, the researchers found that positive words outnumbered negative
> >ones, suggesting a positivity bias in the language, the authors wrote.
>
> It doesn't occur to these fools that their sources may have a stylistic bias
> toward happy talk? What if they'd added a few Victorian pop songs like "The
> Vacant Chair" and "Who Will Care for Mother Now?"
>
> "More than 10,000 words."  Wow!  That's even more than in a term paper. I am
> soooo impressed!

Not to dampen your skepticism, Jon, but that's 10,000 *unique* words (types, not
tokens). If you look at the study, you'll see they analyzed 9 billion words from
Twitter, 360 billion words from Google Books, 1 billion words from The New York
Times, and 59 million words from song lyrics. Presumably enough data to
overcome stylistic biases in the source material.

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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