Words, words, words. Imagine if a novel was a schoolyard of words, and you wanted to know who the bullies were. Imagine if you were deathly afraid of language poetry but then you were given God’s cookbook and could make your own little snarls of sense. I offer you the glory that is Wordle. You can take any block of text, or website, and see which words are the heaviest hitters (not counting conjunctions and prepositions). I first saw it (okay, my friend’s boyfriend who actualy reads the news saw it) in the Boston Globe a couple weeks ago, comparing the most-repeated words in McCain & Obama’s speeches (McCain talked about Obama, Obama talked about change), and now I can’t stop turning everything I can think of into a word-cloud.
Here’s what our blog looked like recently (word size is based on how often it’s repeated). “Whelan” and “Last” (barely beating out “first”) were the most-common words, and our favorite number is four. Vietnam and Gambier vie for our attention, and our favorite tool (I’m guessing metaphorically) is the hammer. “Write,” “poets,” and “oaks” just barely made it in. It was interesting to me to see that “poems,” “poetry” and “poem” were all over the place, while fiction was just a tiny little fish.