I just saw your book list. Are Tocqueville’s books mentioned as Stuart Mill’s ?!

“People who intentionally write for clarity use fewer words, I think. ”

I am sure they do, and they tend to create systems. They use words to classify things (mea culpa, mea culpa), and that seems fine to me, but what if they try to make the world fit into that classification and get the power to try for a long time?

On the other hand, those Americans and Shakespeareans that delight in making a mess of their vocabulary by adding more and more words and puns and derivatives and toxic strings of bits…….grrrrrrr

I use the same template as you, but I do not have such a beautiful header, nor such an incredible tag-line , but I have not yet seen what your line is on this blog. I have two blogs, and the main one, fitfully called “Fishing”, is trying to see what people, especially kids, will actually read concerning the great things of life. (¿ understand ?) And I have a more recent one called “Shoptalk” which is about language, especially the reasons why hispanics can’t learn English.

I will be back here soon to see more.

male = 6073 words per day
female = 8805 words per day

Do you think blogs can be considered daily conversation? It sounds crazy I know, but I’m thinking that blog talk differs slightly from daily verbal conversation.

Do you think Y would be a constant over extended periods where you wouldn’t notice deviations when playing scrabble or other activities?

What about a analyzing your archives for the past year?

For language acquisition applications say for example for ESL students, it would be interesting to determine how many words students should expect to learn to have a basic understanding of the English language.

What was the time period represented by your 13,000 words? I would think that’s the most important part. Could you predict your word count for one year?

Cheers

Thanks for your kind words. A “true figure” would indeed be difficult, and probably expensive, to obtain. But it would be really neat to know, I agree. Perhaps as speech-recognition technology and covert surveillance techniques evolve somebody might attempt collecting data from actual conversations, stratified by race, gender, class, ethnicity, location, education, etc.

One of the nice things about the internet is that I can make a crude estimate like this and learn from it, and share it with other people, without all of the hurdles that would stand in the way of a formal study.

Graham Nash Thailand.