Via Crooked Timber I learned about Wordle, the application that takes any chunk of text and produces a beautiful graphic representation of the most common words therein, sized according to their frequency. So here’s The Grasshopper King:
I especially like the tiny “asked” inside the “d” of “said.” I think that’s just good luck; it would be impressive if Wordle knew enough to make up little figures of this kind.
I wonder if most prose fiction would come out looking pretty much alike, apart from the names of characters? The predominance of “said” must be pretty universal.
If I had no idea (and I have only very little), based solely on this Wordlizing, I’d expect that The Grasshopper King was a dialog-heavy story about two woman, and either a nice chap named Higgs, or an ephemeral boson.
Beautiful! My first thought: “Gee, that Higgs talks a lot.”
muraii: close! But there’s another male character, whose name doesn’t crack the Wordle because he’s the first-person narrator.
That’s beautiful.
I guess checkers weren’t mentioned as often as I remember.
I’ll have to wordle Cary’s book when it’s done. What a cool sight.
Hmm.
“I wonder if most prose fiction would come out looking pretty much alike, apart from the names of characters? The predominance of “said” must be pretty universal.”
Not Gaddis. Dash-demarcated dialogue without names or other narrative intrusion.
“But there’s another male character, whose name doesn’t crack the Wordle because he’s the first-person narrator.”
It seems the Wordle algorithm excludes “I”–which a quick check of TGK shows is in fact used frequently. (“A”, “the”, “of”, and forms of “to be” also fail to appear in your picture. However, submitting a single test sentence showed all of the words, so it must be more complicated than simple exclusion of these words.)