Author: Birchwood

So what words make The Hounds of the Baskervilles sound like a Sherlock story? For starter it features the two antiquated words “hath” and “zeal”. It also has an absurdly large number of instances of “anyone” and “anything”. I think…

I recently came to the shocking realization that I have never read an actual Sherlock Holmes novel. I’ve certainly watched movies and television shows based off the series as well as a few obscure animated adaptations… but when it comes…

I imagine most people here are familiar with “Doge”, a long running Internet joke focused on cute dogs having silly conversations in broken English. But not just any sort of broken English; Doge has actual trends and rules. You can…

Once again the easiest trick we can pull off with word frequencies is to try and normalize the unique vocabulary of Call of the Wild into something somewhat more bland. The idea is simple: We take a sentence, look up…

Time to take a look at the word frequencies for Call of the Wild. It was published in 1903 so we’ll be comparing it to Google’s word counts for 1890 through 1910 as well as to our “modern” set of…

Ah, December. The time of year where everyone starts romanticizing winter weather and dreaming of idyllic snow covered landscapes. Let’s put a stop to that by reading some Jack London, an author famous for his adventure stories about people heading…

Using relative word frequencies to make older sentences sound slightly more modern was interesting, but there’s no reason the process has to run only one way. We can use the same technique to make modern sentences sound slightly more gothic…

One fun, if slightly silly, thing we can do with word frequencies is to “normalize” sentences by replacing low frequency words with more common synonyms, basically removing the unique style of the author and replacing it with the most bland…

I recently compared Mary Shelly’s word choices for Frankenstein to the average word frequencies found across an average of all modern-ish (1990-2005) books and discovered dozens upon dozens of “unusual” words that helped shape the unique tone of her story….

A large part of a book’s sense of style comes from the words the author chooses to use. Was the evening sky scarlet, crimson or red? Did the children laugh with delight or chuckle with glee? Was the sailor depressed,…