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PREFACE

ix Estimates of the number of words in the average person’s vocabulary range from thirty thousand to a hundred thousand. Part of the problem is in the definition of a word. For example, do you count singular and plural? Different spellings of the same word? How about a word that you might use that isn’t in the dictionary, such as “fancify” (as in, to make something fancy)? For a discussion of the number of function words, see Chung and Pennebaker (2007).

x One of the most exciting breakthroughs in language analysis is the recent release of the Google Books corpus. In a stunning article by Jean-Baptiste Michel and his colleagues in the journal Science, the authors analyzed the words from over five million books, or 4 percent of all the books that have ever been printed. Focusing on language use over the last two hundred years, the authors were able to examine a wide range of historical trends. For example, how frequently has Freud or Darwin been mentioned? How long does fame last? How has language been evolving?

I urge you to try out Google Labs’ program Books Ngram Viewer at ngrams.googlelabs.com/. The study of history will never be the same.

xi Some of the best popular books on language that combine a rich knowledge of language with basic social and psychological questions include Goffman’s Forms of Talk, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, George Miller’s The Science of Words, Pinker’s The Language Instinct, Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand, and Wierzbicka’s Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words.

CHAPTER 1: DISCOVERING THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MOST FORGETTABLE WORDS

3 The website Analyzewords.com is one of several experimental sites that we have been developing. This one was the result of a collaboration among Chris Wilson, a writer at Slate.com; my daughter, Teal Pennebaker, who is a world-class expert on social media; and my longtime computer guru and collaborator Roger Booth. The program analyzes the recent history of anyone’s Twitter posts. Using algorithms we have developed over several years of studying language and personality, we are able to estimate personality profiles by language use. As with all experimental systems, please don’t take the results too seriously.

4 The expressive writing research has a rich history. The basic idea is that if people are asked to write about a traumatic experience for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three or four consecutive days, they later show improvements in physical and mental health compared to others who have been asked to write about superficial topics. To get a better sense of the literature, see my popular book Opening Up as well as articles by Frattaroli (2006) and Pennebaker and Chung (2011). For a list of articles, including many that you can read for free, go to the publications link on my website, www.psy.utexas.edu/pennebaker.

6 For technical information about the development of the LIWC program, see the articles associated with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count on the publications link of my website, www.psy.utexas.edu/pennebaker. The LIWC program is commercially available from www.liwc.net. All profits from the sales of the program are returned to the University of Texas at Austin graduate program in the Department of Psychology.

LIWC is by no means the only text analysis program around. Dozens of different programs are now available. Programs that are particularly useful for people interested in language and psychology include:

Art Graesser’s Coh-Metrix program (cohmetrix.memphis.edu), which calculates the degree to which any groups of texts are readable and coherent.

Rod Hart’s DICTION program (www.dictionsoftware.com) was designed to capture the verbal tone of messages, with particular focus on political speeches.

Tom Landauer’s Latent Semantic Analysis (lsa.colorado.edu) is a suite of programs that allows people to compare the similarity of any texts with other texts.

Mike Scott’s Wordsmith program (www.lexically.net) is a wonderful all-purpose