词汇大师(Wordmaster)--Wordcount.org

Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: September 2, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: counting words.

RS: If you wanted to show people the 88,000 most common words in English, how would you do it? Jonathan Harris thought of a sentence -- or something that looks like one. He works on interactive¹ art projects. He laid out the words in a straight line, from the most frequently used to the least frequently used.

AA: This is all on a Web site, so you keep clicking to the right to read the words on the screen. Or you can look up specific words to see their ranking. There's also a visual trick that displays the words as a graph. The most common are in really big type; the least common are in really small type.

RS: Jonathan Harris is an artist in the field of "information visualization²." What he created is wordcount-dot-org.

JONATHAN HARRIS: "The experience I was trying to create for the user was like an archeologist sort of sifting³ through sand. And you never really get a look at the whole language at any one time. You really have to zero in one specific part and explore there. And in this sense you can really spend hours just killing⁴ time on this and playing around."

RS: "You say it's like one very long sentence, but is there anything connecting these words?"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "That's what's really interesting, and this is the one aspect of WordCount that people have really gravitated toward, as I've found. Because the data is essentially⁵ random⁶ -- I mean, it's not random, but the fact that a given word is next to another word is only based on how often those words appear in normal English usage. But when you have 88,000 words placed back to back, chances are pretty good that a few of those sequences are going to form some pretty conspiratorial⁷ meanings.

"Every morning I sort of come into work and I check my e-mail and I have a pile of e-mails waiting for me from people all around the globe that have found interesting sequences in WordCount. Some of my favorites are words 992 to 995 are 'American ensure oil opportunity.' Then 4304 to 4307 is 'Microsoft acquire salary tremendous.'"

AA: "I like this one, 5283 to 5285, which is 'angel seeks supper.'"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "Exactly. I found that a lot of people suggest that this be used as a good device for people trying to come up with a name for their band."

RS: "How is it determined⁸, the frequency of any given word?"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "The frequency is data that is not generated by me. The frequency data was all coming from this source data that I used, which is the British National Corpus and that's a collection of written and spoken English words that were collected over a few years, I think back in the mid-1990s, by this group in England. It's a little bit dated; I've found one word that people are often surprised does not appear at all in the archive is blog. So clearly the phenomenon of Web logging came up after this data was collected."

AA: "So now you describe this basically as an 88,000-word-long sentence, starting with the word 'the,' the most frequently used word in the English language. What's at the other end?"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "The other end is surprising, and this is a big point of contention⁹ for a lot of people that actually find what the last word is. But the last word, surprisingly or not, is conquistador. And if you look through the list and you spend some time with it, you'll find that there are many words much, much further in front of conquistador that you've never even heard of. So clearly there seems to be some errata in their data."

AA: "So conquistador, as in a Spanish conqueror¹⁰?"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "Some other interesting sort of comparative rankings: war is 304 and peace is 1,155. Love beats hate, Coke beats Pepsi and love beats sex by over 1,000."

AA: "Now this is according to British usage from a few years ago, right?"

JONATHAN HARRIS: "That's right, so maybe this has all changed since then. WordCount went online about five months ago, and almost nobody saw it for about four months. And then back at the beginning of July a friend of mine posted it on his blog and within about a day or two days, the site was getting about 20,000 unique visitors a day.

"And I was getting e-mails from all over the world, mainly people taking issue with some of the apparent disparities in the data, how some seemingly obscure words were being placed ahead of seemingly more common ones, but other people that were just sort of touched by how fun it was. And people, you know, found these little comparisons entertaining, like the Coke and Pepsi, and the love and the hate, and the war and the peace. Things like this."

RS: Jonathan Harris, talking to us from Fabrica, a creative think tank for young artists where he has a year-long fellowship. It鈥檚 located near Venice, Italy, and it's where he developed wordcount dot o-r-g.

AA: And that's all for this week. Our e-mail address is。。。。。。And our Web site is voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble.

 

1 interactive   

adj.相互作用的，互相影响的，（电脑）交互的

参考例句：

• The psychotherapy is carried out in small interactive groups.这种心理治疗是在互动的小组之间进行的。
• This will make videogames more interactive than ever.这将使电子游戏的互动性更胜以往。

2 visualization   

n.想像，设想

参考例句：

• In 2D visualization and drawing applications, vertical and horizontal scrolling are common. 在二维的可视化及绘图应用中，垂直和水平滚动非常普遍。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
• Ophthalmoscopy affords the only opportunity for direct visualization of blood vessels. 检眼镜检查法提供直接观察血管的唯一机会。

3 sifting   

n.筛，过滤v.筛( sift的现在分词 )；筛滤；细查；详审

参考例句：

• He lay on the beach, sifting the sand through his fingers. 他躺在沙滩上用手筛砂子玩。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• I was sifting the cinders when she came in. 她进来时，我正在筛煤渣。 来自辞典例句

4 killing   

n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财

参考例句：

• Investors are set to make a killing from the sell-off.投资者准备清仓以便大赚一笔。
• Last week my brother made a killing on Wall Street.上个周我兄弟在华尔街赚了一大笔。

5 essentially   

adv.本质上，实质上，基本上

参考例句：

• Really great men are essentially modest.真正的伟人大都很谦虚。
• She is an essentially selfish person.她本质上是个自私自利的人。

6 random   

adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动

参考例句：

• The list is arranged in a random order.名单排列不分先后。
• On random inspection the meat was found to be bad.经抽查，发现肉变质了。

7 conspiratorial   

adj.阴谋的，阴谋者的

参考例句：

• She handed the note to me with a conspiratorial air. 她鬼鬼祟祟地把字条交给了我。 来自辞典例句
• It was enough to win a gap-toothed, conspiratorial grin. 这赢得对方咧嘴一笑。 来自互联网

8 determined   

adj.坚定的；有决心的

参考例句：

• I have determined on going to Tibet after graduation.我已决定毕业后去西藏。
• He determined to view the rooms behind the office.他决定查看一下办公室后面的房间。

9 contention   

n.争论，争辩，论战；论点，主张

参考例句：

• The pay increase is the key point of contention. 加薪是争论的焦点。
• The real bone of contention,as you know,is money.你知道，争论的真正焦点是钱的问题。

10 conqueror   

n.征服者，胜利者

参考例句：

• We shall never yield to a conqueror.我们永远不会向征服者低头。
• They abandoned the city to the conqueror.他们把那个城市丢弃给征服者。