Love Dream Sex Death

I was thinking about Mario's thesis topic yesterday and had a tangent about the psychological response we have to certain words. Particular words, for example “death,” “love,” “sex,” and “dream,” have a ton of power. I can’t remember which magazine it is, but one of the bigger women’s magazines, maybe Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour… something like that, changed their description to include these four words and readership almost instantly went up. (Sorry I can’t remember any of the details on this). It would be (completely impossible but) very interesting if Mario could assign each word in the English language a type of juiciness rating and then see if the frequency at which words pop up is correlated at all with this rating. Even more difficult, he could look at the purpose of the text in which the word occurs, and see if texts that were created in order to make money, magazines, newspapers, …, contain “juicy words” at a higher ratio than general texts.

As a side note, Mario, check out http://www.wordcount.org/main.php. It’s a website that seems like it does pretty much just what you wanted your thesis website to do. Word Wrap visually ranks the top 86,800 English words from the most frequently used to the least frequently used (conquistador, by the way  ). Good luck with your project!