Image: NPR Multimedia/AP Photo
Purple, Prose: The new book Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve subjects thousands of books to statistical analysis.
Nabokov’s favorite word is mauve. That is actually the name of a book by statistician Ben Blatt.
Glen Weldon reviewed it at National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. Blatt, he reports, “loaded thousands of books — classics and contemporary best-sellers — into various databases and let his hard drive churn through them, seeking to determine, for example, if our favorite authors follow conventional writing advice about using cliches, adverbs and exclamation points (they mostly do); if men and women write differently (yep); if an algorithm can identify a writer from his or her prose style (it can); and which authors use the shortest first sentences (Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Mark Twain) versus those who use the longest (Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon, Edith Wharton). …
“Blatt’s book isn’t terribly interested in the art of writing. What it’s fascinated by — and is fascinating about — is the craft of writing.
“Technique. Word choice. Sentence structure. Reading level. There’s something cheeky in the way Blatt throws genre best-sellers into his statistical blender alongside literary lions and hits puree, looking for patterns of style shared by, say, James Joyce and James Patterson. …
“Blatt looked for the specific words that authors use much more frequently than the rate at which those words generally occur in the rest of written English (i.e., compared to a huge sample of literary works — some 385 million words in total — written in English between 1810 and 2009, assembled by linguists at Brigham Young University). …
“Here’s some that jumped out at me. Jane Austen: civility, fancying, imprudence … Dan Brown: grail, masonic, pyramid. … Truman Capote: clutter, zoo, geranium. John Cheever: infirmary, venereal, erotic … Agatha Christie: inquest, alibi, frightful. F. Scott Fitzgerald: facetious, muddled, sanitarium. Ian Fleming: lavatory, trouser, spangled … Ernest Hemingway: concierge, astern, cognac … Toni Morrison: messed, navel, slop.”
For many people, doing this to literature would be off-putting, but to me it is interesting. And fun. One of the reasons a favorite mystery writer, Eliot Pattison, stopped being my favorite was that I got bored with everyone who got hurt “moaning.”
Check out Weldon’s favorite findings from the book at NPR, here.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
I agree this is fascinating but it leaves the “so what?” question unanswered. My academic field was one where we took a very close look at language choices, doing it the old-fashioned way, with close textual analysis, but we were never allowed to stop with the simple findings of what words were used most often together, etc. The question was always, “so what?” So what that Nabokov used mauve a lot? What do we learn about him, or his relationship with his readers, or his popularity, etc., etc., from counting mauves? When the statistician combines his expertise with the literary or rhetorical critic, that’s when things could get really interesting!
Many thanks for this long and truly awesome response. So glad it didn’t get lost in cyberspace after all!
Hahahaha! You got it! So glad–but I got busted, really, because it wasn’t all that long or all that awesome!
I just wrote a really long, really awesome (according to me!) response and it went missing in cyberspace! Arrrrrgghhhhhh!