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 the book fit my statistical criteria of “being rare in modern usage but common compared to other books from the 1920s”.
That said we aren’t just mapping how language changes over time. We also want to see what it is that makes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works unique. And there are plenty of author and book specific statistics to look at here.
First item of note is that “absurd” and it’s variations occur relatively frequently, which in many ways encapsulates the entire theme of the book. In a lot of ways The Beautiful and Damned is one long examination of the bizarre and almost surreal strangeness of human life.
And of course we also see a lot of both beauty and damnations. Let’s start with the beauty (which itself is used 62 times):
- adoration
- brilliant
- dazzling
- enraptured
- glamourous
- gorgeous
- immaculate
- lovely
- luscious
- magnificent
- perfectness
- radiant
And then of course come all the damned words (itself used 10 times, although at least half were as explicitives rather than using the word as a serious adjective):
- abominable
- bleak
- broken
- brute
- depravity
- despair
- exasperation
- futile
- hate
- madness
- pandemonium
- scorn
Also, a final example of an amusing bit of analysis error. The word “caramel” was used an astounding 71 times in the book, a fact that originally confused me because I didn’t remember candy playing a particularly large role in the story. Sure, there was an anecdote early on about someone having a deep love of gumdrops… but caramel? The solution to this mystery was the fact that a minor supporting character happened to be named “Richard Caramel”.
When doing any sort of text analysis it’s useful to remember that a lot of people, especially in fiction, have last names that are common nouns. This can cause a certain word to look much more important than it really is. Fortunately there are tools that can be used to guess whether a word is part of a name or an actual stand alone noun but when doing a simple naive word count like I do this sort of detail is easy to miss.
