A few of my favourite words

A recent article in the New Yorker by Brad Leithauser discusses writers’ use of pet words. Beginning with the observation that Shakespeare used the word ‘sweet’ and its variants nearly a thousand times, Leithauser goes on to argue that looking at a writer’s lexicon can tell you about the writer’s outlook on the world. The writer himself is often oblivious to these pet words until they have been pointed out by someone else.

So I decided to take a look at my own writing on this blog to see if I too have pet words. I took all the text in the posts to date and ran the text through a word cloud generator (in this case, Wordle). The resulting word cloud shows the most common words (prepositions like “in” and articles like “the” are excluded) adjusting the size of the word based on the frequency with which it appears.

It was good to see that the subject of the blog — reintroduction/reintroduced, beaver(s), muskox, Norway/Norwegian, and Sweden/Swedish –figure most prominently in the word cloud. After all, that’s what the blog is supposed to be about. My approach, as evidenced in words like history, story, article(s), historical, environmental, research, journal, book, and post, also populate the cloud in fair numbers.

Interestingly, species and people are both pretty big and about the same size. I think this indicates that I’ve tried to be symmetrical in my treatment of humans and the animals I write about. My story is not just about one or the other, but about both in concert.

I also see in the cloud that I’m fond of writing about the “first” and the “last”, which is of course part and parcel with writing stories about extinction and re-introduction. But it is noteworthy since I’ve generally been critical of people who look for “the first” of something since I often think they simply haven’t spread their net far enough back in the past.

As far as “pet words” go, I see a reliance on “think”, “like”, and comparative conjunctions (“even”, “although”, “rather”), and some preference for “different” and “interesting”. In a bit of self-psychoanalysis here, I am going to say that I use “think” often because I am trying to let the reader into my thought processes. I don’t want the reader to take my posts as objective truth, but rather be privy to the way that I’ve reached the conclusions I’ve come it. “Like” likely means I have a tendency to use similes to express myself, meaning that I’m trying to connect prior reader knowledge to my topic which I think of as new. The other words show that I also  think (see, there it is again!) there would be a standard interpretation out there of an event I’ve described which I am contradicting.

I was a bit surprised that “just” didn’t come out bigger, as I have noticed recently that it is a fairly common word for me to use. I’m going to keep an eye out for it in any case in the future, since there may be better was to express myself than using “just”.

I’m actually pretty happy with the word cloud results. This blog is indeed about letting the reader into my research from the back, if you will. It’s about showing how reintroduction has a cultural context, not just a scientific species-based one. It is about breaking down some preconceived boundaries while building new knowledge.

I think this is the kind of exercise all writers should do once in a while to check that the words on the page are reflecting the desired message. A few favourite words can carry significant meaning.