War & Fudge

Dang, I'm busier than a cat covering crap on a marble floor lately. Thus, I leave you with these two curiosities:

Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers.

Curious, isn't it, how Kenny Rogers has a look so distinctive that everyone knows of someone in their daily lives that resembles Kenny Rogers.

My favorites so far are Freaky Mullet Kenny and Neckless Kenny:

and then:

Amazon Text Stats In its insidious quest to become the one-stop repository for every tidbit of knowledge that ever existed, Amazon has implemented this new feature on some of its books.

For example, dig this link to War & Peace. Mid-page, there's a Concordance section, which gives a visual represenation of the number of occurrences of words, excluding and, the, etc. Then if you hover over a word with the mouse, it tells you the number of occurrences. If you click it, you get a contextual report of all the occurrences.

Just below Concordance is the Text Stats thing, which shows not only the number of words, but a variety of readability indices:

* The Fog Index was developed by Robert Gunning. It indicates the number of years of formal education required to read and understand a passage of text. A score between 7 and 8 is considered ideal, while a score above 12 is considered difficult to read.

* The Flesch Index, developed in 1940 by Dr. Rudolph Flesch, is another indicator of reading ease. The score returned is based on a 100 point scale, with 100 being easiest to read. Scores between 90 and 100 are appropriate for 5th and 6th graders, while a college degree is considered necessary to understand text with a score between 0 and 30.

* The Flesch-Kincaid Index is a refinement to the Flesch Index that tries to relate the score to a U.S. grade level. For example, text with a Flesch-Kincaid score of 10.1 would be considered suitable for someone with a 10th grade or higher reading level.

from the Flesch Index:
"a college degree is considered necessary to understand text with a score between 0 and 30."
War & Peace has a Flesch Index of 59.1!

By contrast, Judy Blume's "Superfudge", one of my favorite books from elementary school has the following:

Fog Index: 5.0
Flesch Index: 83.3
Syllables/Word: 1.4
Flesch-Kincaid Index: 3.6

I'm not prepared to perform any sort of lexical analysis here, but it's interesting that Superfudge and War & Peace both have the same average number of syllables per word, eh?

Another queeriosity is the Concordance section on Superfudge: one of the most common words is "asked," whereas in War & Peace, one of the most common words is "said." What can this mean? And there are 74 occurrences of "worms"!

COMMENTS

HIDE