Which words do I "own"? Caveblogem evaluates Second Effort

Two weeks ago I mentioned that I'd volunteered this blog for an ongoing study by Caveblogem of Pretty Good on Paper.

Well, late yesterday, Second Effort became the 21st blog to undergo Caveblogem's word analysis. Here's a link to Caveblogem's post.

(And the post where Caveblogem announced and explained his study can be found here.)

As I understand it, Caveblogem was inspired when he read that the size of the average college graduate's vocabulary ranges from 20-25,000 words to 60,000 'active' words and 75,000 'passive' words. This got him thinking about how many distinct words he used in his own blog. He took a sample of 15,000 words -- reduced to 13,000 by stripping out proper names, misspellings, emoticons and other non-words -- and determined how many words he actually used. Then he extrapolated from that sample to come up with an approximation of the number of words that constituted a working vocabulary for his blog.

He then took the experiment into the Blogosphere: How many words are people really using out here? This is the 21st blog that Caveblogem has evaluated. (Linda's blog, Are We There Yet? was the 18th. Reading about Caveblogem on Linda's blog was what inspired me to volunteer.)

Caveblogem says I added 717 new words to his growing word base, using a total of 4,490 different words in total of 28,931 words published between March 15 and May 14 of this year.

(And you eagerly devoured each of them, didn't you, Dear Reader?)

Caveblogem said the 4,490 different words used here "may be some kind of record, actually. It seems pretty far from the norm, but I would have to check the records to say for sure." (Please. I blush.) He added that "the sample I took from my own eclectic and highly literate blog yielded only 3,100 unique words." Of course, this is not fair: The sample from Caveblogem's blog was less than half as big as the sample he took from here. And, in any event, it's a long way from even the low estimate for a college graduate's supposed vocabulary.

Clearly, there is much about this that I don't understand. But -- no matter -- there are cool pictures: Caveblogem makes a "word cloud" showing words sized according to frequency of use. Here's the one he did for Second Effort:

This "word cloud" is in a font called "Curlmudgeon." I think we can guess why Caveblogem chose it.

Looking at it now... apparently I do talk a lot about baseball. Hmmmmmmm. In my defense I can only say that the sample included Opening Day. I suppose I could try and argue that "Sox" is also a common abbreviation for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act -- which, as it happens, it is -- but this is yet another legal topic about which I am entirely ignorant.

And one more cool picture. Caveblogem generated a Venn diagram showing, on the left, words I used that so far no one else had, "sized relative to the frequency of use;" in the middle, words that everybody else has used "sized according to how much more frequently The Curmudgeon used them in the sample;" and, on the right, words that everyone else used... but that I did not:

My thanks to Caveblogem for allowing me to participate in this study.