Recent Posts
The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy, starts when a hard working but short tempered man drinks a bit too much, starts complaining about his marriage and then wakes up the next morning with a horrible hangover and the shocking…
It’s been a while since I’ve done a “sentence modernization” post, so let’s take some excerpts from The Beautiful and Damned and see what happens when we replace every word with more common equivalents. It will be interesting to see…
The Beautiful and the Damned is a snapshot of the roaring twenties, and so it seems more than appropriate that the “most unique” sentence in the book is a description of that era’s extravagant night life: There were opera cloaks…
The Beautiful and Damned is only about a hundred years old, which experience has shown is recent enough to feel more or less like modern English but with different slang. This is reflected in the fact that no words in…
In celebration of The Great Gatsby finally entering the public domain we’ll be looking at one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s earlier and lesser known books: The Beautiful and Damned. It tells the story of a young man and woman who…
We’ve gotten pretty good at finding words that an author uses unusually often. But what about the opposite? What about words that the author uses less than we expect, or even not at all? After all, Cuchulain, the Hound of…
The unique sentence results for Cuchulain wound up being an interesting lesson in the importance of proper pre-processing when doing natural language processing. While the relative frequency results are interesting enough the global frequency results were basically useless. See for…
Time to dig deeper into the writing style of Eleanor Henrietta Hull in her book Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster. The first and most unusual note is that there were zero words that fit the criteria of my “common in…
Ireland has a rich set of myths and legends that I know almost nothing about other than the fact that there was a hero named Cú Chulainn that keeps showing up in Japanese RPGs*. Fortunately back in the early 1900s…
Moby Dick is a very very long book, partially because the author enjoys going off on tangents and partially because he insists on providing thorough background details on the biology of whales and the nature of the whaling industry. And…