Wednesday, February 9, 2011

sorry noam

Blog!


I'm currently trapped in a gigantic spiderweb. Not sure how long it'll be before the spiders (it's a swarm of regular-sized spiders, not one giant spider) come back to feast, so I'm gonna have to make this one quick...



I've been here for a few hours now, but I haven't just been hanging around this whole time! I saw this as an opportunity for research! But not just any research: meaningless corpus linguistics research! I gotta tell you, Blog, linguistic corpora have gotten me through some pretty dark times in my life. Sorting through all that neatly parsed data is just so soothing, so sensual, so... erotic.


I hate this joke, but the picture took  so long to make that I'm keeping it. god dammit

...anyway, I decided to look into something that I had noticed recently. It seems to me that people use the word "really" a lot! At least in comparison with other adverbs... So I thought "What the fuck" and busted out the old Corpus of Historical American English [link] and did a basic search for "really" and recorded the results from each decade from 1810 to 2000. Check out these wicked ass results, yo.

awww fuck, empirical evidence


Holy fuck, Blog! Do you see that? Americans say "really" way more now than we ever did before! Pretty cool to be able to observe language changi--Blog shut up I hear something coming! 


It's Noam Chomsky! Hi Noam!

>>Hello. I am Noam Chomsky

Right! Can you help me out here?

>>Sure thing. Just gotta maneuver around your boner.

It's not what you think, Noam! I was just looking up something in COHA and--

>>You what? Corpus Linguistics? Are you fucking serious?

Whoa, guy, it's not that big of a deal...

>>You're a disgrace. Completely misapplying yourself. l8r.

Hey Blog, that guy was a real asshole, I'm gonna go :( xoxoxo :(

6 comments:

  1. linguistics boner AGAIN, Sid???

    ReplyDelete
  2. Noam Chomsky is a god.

    ReplyDelete
  3. dude you are so weird and funny.

    I held the door open for Noam Chomsky a few weeks ago as he went from the Stata Center/CSAIL into the building he was leaving. That's the 2nd time I've seen him but I don't distract him. I just give him a big, encouraging smile and let him get on with his business. :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. that's really cool! hahaha nah but seriously, funny post

    ReplyDelete