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 word counts from 1990 through 2005.
Once again the list of era specific “old” words is surprisingly small, being nothing more than the single word “gentlemen”. As a reminder we classify a word as being era specific if an author uses it ten times more often than a modern author but no more than twice as often as other authors from their own time. In other words it is a word that would seem out of place to us but perfectly normal to someone living at the same time as the author.
But what about style specific words that Jack London uses more often than both the average modern and the average era author? The words that help define Call of the Wild? That is a significantly more robust list!
We of course get quite a lot of nice canine words, both sympathetic and synister:
- bark
- furry
- growled
- howl
- lick
- jugular
- slaver
- stalk
- teeth… so many teeth…
- wagged
- whimpered
- whine
Call of the Wild unsurprisingly also features an abundance of wilderness adventure words:
- blizzards
- cold
- famished
- glaciers
- lake
- moonlight
- salmon
- snow
- snow
- snow (33 instances! One out of every thousand words was snow!)
And of course as a dramatic story of man against nature, or at least dog against nature, we have a full set of powerful emotional words on display:
- brutality
- ferocity
- fury
- madness
- outrage
- terrible
