Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve

by Ben Blatt

  In 2014 a paper titled “Loudness in the Novel” was published by the Stanford Literary Lab. The author, Holst Katsma, categorized “speaking verbs” into three categories: loud, neutral, and quiet. Katsma offered the following three examples from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

  Loud: “Off with their heads!” shouted the Queen.

  Neutral: “I suppose so,” said Alice.

  Quiet: He whispered, “She’s under sentence of execution.”

  Katsma was able to explore a few trends with the data, including finding which words were associated with loud dialogue more than neutral dialogue. He used old novels (ones from the 1800s) and found in his sample that why, stop, God, and the exclamation point were found in loud dialogue at a higher rate than neutral dialogue. Words like night, well, suppose, and the period were found in neutral dialogue more.

  I wanted to find out if Katsma’s method could help answer the question of whether Americans write loudly. Can we measure whether American English is itself louder than British English?

  Below are the words that Katsma classified as “loud,” “neutral,” or “quiet.” I used his list for my own analysis, though I did add first-person present and third-person present verbs to the mix (to account for different narrators and tenses).

  LOUD

  NEUTRAL

  QUIET

  Cried, Exclaimed, Shouted, Roared, Screamed, Shrieked, Vociferated, Bawled, Called, Ejaculated, Retorted, Proclaimed, Announced, Protested, Accosted, Declared

  Said, Replied, Observed, Rejoined, Asked, Answered, Returned, Repeated, Remarked, Enquired, Responded, Suggested, Explained, Uttered, Mentioned

  Whispered, Murmured, Sighed, Grumbled, Mumbled, Muttered, Whimpered, Hushed, Faltered, Stammered, Trembled, Gasped, Shuddered

  Any “loudness score” will be imperfect. It depends on defining words like shouted and proclaimed as (equally) loud and sighed or grumbled as (equally) quiet. Not every author describes every piece of dialogue with a colorful descriptor. And Katsma’s extensive list does not include all verbs ever used to describe “loud” or “quiet” dialogue. But his method offers a workable metric, especially in aggregate, so I’ve done some tests using the exact words listed above.

  Authors do not write every book at the same level, but their habits tend to be consistent. Below is a plot showing the difference in “loud” and “quiet” speaking verbs in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series. The third Harry Potter book was 51 % “loud” to 49 % “quiet,” meaning Rowling used about as many “loud” verbs as “quiet” ones. Angels and Demons comes in at 73 % “loud” to 27 % “quiet,” meaning that in this book Brown used almost three times as many “loud” verbs as “quiet” ones.

  On the opposite page is a chart showing the loudness of the fifty different authors that I’ve used as examples throughout this book. Black bars denote British authors, while purple bars represent Americans.

  There are a fair amount of British authors on the quiet end—but it’s far from consistent. If anything, the more striking finding is how far E L James and Stephenie Meyer diverge from the rest of the authors here—in large part because of personal style and the focus on romance in their books. There are some additional surprises: the Harry Potter series and Agatha Christie novels are so filled with action that I would not have guessed them to be on the “quiet” end of the spectrum. Or that Hemingway is the loudest of the loud (though maybe that’s not too surprising).

  If you are familiar with the Rowling novels, you might start to hypothesize about what contributes to their “quietness.” Does the fact that much of the action in the series revolves around sneaking about Hogwarts have anything to do with this? If so, does this make the novels appear more “quiet” than they are? Or is the “quiet” sneaking action a perfect example of the subdued action compared to an American series?

  The results are interesting to speculate about, but it’s a small sample with too much variance among genre and time to offer a comparison between Americans or Brits as a whole. The ideal sample would be narrow in terms of genre and subject matter, and in terms of time period—with plenty of authors from both the U.K. and the U.S. So, back to the fan fiction.

  The three story universes with the most entries on FanFiction.net are Harry Potter, Twilight, and Percy Jackson. I downloaded all stories written in each genre that were full-length (60,000-plus words), which amounted to 284 million words over 2,225 stories.

  Twilight was on the quiet side. Within its fan fiction, however, there is a marked difference between its American writers and its writers from the United Kingdom. Overall American writers are indeed louder.

  There are many ways we could slice the results. I categorized fan-fiction novels into being either “loud” or “quiet” based on whether they were more than 50 % “loud.” For example, all of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books are “loud” because they have more “loud” verbs than “quiet.” While around one-third of British Twilight writers were loud, over one-half of all Americans were. If we look at Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, the results are consistent, even if the magnitude is less. In the huge sample of thousands of stories, there are many more “loud” American writers than “loud” British writers.

  So do these results mean that Americans are in fact louder in their writing than the quiet Brits? I would argue that it does. In samples of hundreds of millions of words by thousands of individuals Americans come out “louder” than Brits.

  The fifty writers I’ve been looking at showed no conclusive results, but if you look at other large fiction samples, the small but noticeable pattern we find in fan-fiction stays true. I took the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and looked at how “loud” and “quiet” words were used. These samples don’t allow for as perfect a comparison as fan fiction, but they are similar. Both corpuses contain hundreds of millions of words and both cover a similar modern time period (1980–1993 for BNC and 1990–2015 for COCA). I looked at just the “fiction” texts in each sample. Because the corpuses are based on texts that the researchers from different institutions choose to include, it’s possible one could end up having more thrillers, or more romances, or more young adult, or more literary fiction.

  Still they are huge samples that are used to compare general trends in language. If the BNC showed that Brits were louder than Americans, you might doubt the fan-fiction sample above. However, this comparison confirms the finding. For every word with a “loud” or “quiet” value in the British sample, 66 % were “loud.” In the American sample, 73 % were “loud.” It’s not deafening, but if you listen, you can hear a difference.

  * * *

  I. This is based on my count. Books have multiple settings. This includes all books that have any action taking place in Maine.

  II. For these numbers and the chart above, author nationality is not always singular or certain. The country the author identified with or spent most time writing in was selected.

  III. According to 2014 article “The American Cinema: A Cultural Imperialism?”

  “Don’t you wish sometimes that writing were just like sports? That you could just go out there and see who’d win? See who’s better. Measurably. With all the stats.”

  —DUB TRAYNOR IN THE INFORMATION BY MARTIN AMIS

  When I was a ten-year-old I wrote a series of eight superhero “books,” each taking up between 40 to 100 handwritten pages. There were two protagonists, one of whom was named Bubonic Boben Blaster after myself (Bubonic Boben Blaster). He was like me in every way except for his one superpower: the ability to infect his enemies with the bubonic plague.

  It was bad.

  Here’s a passage (bolded for emphasis):

  Then Bubonic Boben Blaster took over control of the airplane. Then he kept flying until he saw grass and he put the plane on autoland. Then Bubonic Boben Blaster helped everyone jump off the plane with their luggage. No one knew where they
were. Then Bubonic Boben Blaster looked at a map and saw they were in South Carolina.

  I remember the day in the year 2000 when I read this page to my fourth-grade class. Of all the possible feedback a teacher could have offered up after that passage, I was told: “Do not start two sentences in a row with the same word.”

  For years this advice stuck with me, and it became a simple rule that I followed in essays. Changing the first word around was a surefire way to make sure consecutive sentences did not have identical structure. Many writing guides offer the same advice.

  But if you’re not a ten-year-old with weak control of the written word, it’s clear that repeated words can have strong rhetorical power. While the recurring Then in my own childhood writing is cringeworthy, in other cases repetition has a clear rhetorical purpose. Consider the famous line below, from one of Winston Churchill’s World War II speeches.

  We shall go on to the end . . . . We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. . . .

  The repetition is what makes it memorable. When done well such repetition allows for a sense of rhythm and power. Here’s a literary example from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times with the repeated sentence beginnings in bold.

  He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh. A man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility.

  The technical term for this device—repeating a word or phrase at the beginning of consecutive sentences—is anaphora. And Dickens is the master. You may be familiar with the opening to A Tale of Two Cities—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .”—which is one of the most memorable examples of anaphora in all of English literature. His longest string of sentences starting with the same word lasts 26 sentences in a row, all starting with when in his novel A Haunted Man.

  So far, this book has been filled with big-picture perspectives on whole genres and collections of authors, deep dives into overlooked but universal elements such as word frequencies and sentence lengths. But sometimes the unique quirks, whether they be special words or literary devices, are what make a reader remember an author’s voice. Data can shed light on these smaller questions as well. There are rules for writing, but every good rule has been broken by a good author. Anaphora is one of those rules.

  In this chapter I’ll be looking at writers’ eccentricities. In honor of Dickens and the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, I’ll start by presenting a data-driven case study on anaphora: a tale of two columnists.

  Krugman vs. Brooks

  Paul Krugman is a left-leaning professor and Nobel Prize winner. David Brooks is a right-leaning journalist and author of several books. Both are noted for their opinion columns in the New York Times.

  I collected the most recent year’s worth of opinion columns from both Krugman and Brooks. Next time you read one of Brooks’s columns, keep your eyes open for anaphora. In 91 out of all 93 David Brooks columns from that year-long period, he had at least two sentences in a row that started with the same word. It’s rare for Brooks not to employ anaphora in some form. Here’s the start of one of his columns, a short but pointed example: Some people like to keep a journal. Some people think it’s a bad idea.

  Or consider these six consecutive sentences that all start off with the same four words:

  It used to be that senators didn’t go out campaigning against one another. It used to be they didn’t filibuster except in rare circumstances. It used to be they didn’t block presidential nominations routinely.

  It used to be that presidents didn’t push the limits of executive authority by redefining the residency status of millions of people without congressional approval. It used to be that presidents didn’t go out negotiating arms control treaties in a way that doesn’t require Senate ratification. It used to be that senators didn’t write letters to hostile nations while their own president was negotiating with them.

  In total 9 % of all Brooks sentences start with the same word as the previous sentence. This is a rough metric for anaphora, but an informative one. In contrast to Brooks, only 2 % of Krugman’s sentences fall into that criterion.

  While over 95 % of all Brooks columns had at least one example of anaphora, less than half of Krugman opinion columns did. It’s not like Krugman and his editor avoid anaphora like the (bubonic) plague, but it’s rare. When he does start off consecutive sentences with the same word it’s rarely the rhetorical choice that it is for Brooks.

  If I were to offer my own reaching theory as to why Krugman shies away from the strong rhetoric it would be from his academic background. In a need to be comprehensive, he hedges, negotiates, and qualifies all his points. The most common words that Krugman and Brooks use to start their sentences offer evidence of this theory.

  David Brooks uses the as his most frequent sentence starter. This is to be expected. Though sometimes bested by he, she, or I in literature, the is almost always the most common sentence lead across writing. Pronouns aside, it’s hard to think of any other word that could top the. Brooks uses the more than twice as often to start sentences as any other individual word.

  But what about Krugman? He starts more sentences with but than the. The conjunction but, a word that indicates the writer is about to say something to undermine or qualify a previous statement in some way, is Krugman’s favorite way to start a sentence. While Brooks uses the twice as often as but to start a sentence, Krugman uses but a full 33 % more often than the.

  And in the most common three-word sentence openings found in Krugman and Brooks columns, we see Krugman clarifying and chaining his sentences while Brooks favors a more direct approach.

  Top Three-Word Sentence Openers: Krugman vs. Brooks

  KRUGMAN

  BROOKS

  It’s true that

  Over the past

  At this point

  Most of us

  Which brings me

  If you are

  The point is

  You have to

  As a result

  It is a

  The truth is

  This is the

  As I said

  In X % of

  On the contrary

  On the other

  One answer is

  The people who

  The answer is

  In the first

  Krugman’s affinity for But or So might be part of the reason he cannot use anaphora. There are not many ways to begin consecutive sentences with But without devolving into a tangle of contradictions. On the other hand, Brooks is often guided by larger philosophical arguments, where rhetoric is a crucial element for getting his point across.

  Vonnegut vs. Pynchon

  When Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007 Time magazine author Lev Grossman started off his eulogy of the novelist with this: The proper length for an obituary for Kurt Vonnegut is three words: “So it goes.”

  “So it goes” is a refrain used by the narrator in Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut uses it to tell us that someone is dying, and it also serves as a transition between stories. It is so integral to the author’s most famous novel that the expression has lived a life of its own, as seen in Vonnegut’s obituaries and the title of Vonnegut’s biography by Charles J. Shields.

  From a literary point of view the repetition of “So it goes” helps set the tone of the entire story. But the phrase also has a unique property from a mathemat
ical point of view: With 106 uses, it is the most frequent sentence in all of Vonnegut’s novels.

  And in my survey of all fifty authors, no other sentence is used as often in a single work. In fact, no other sentence comes close. By my count the second-place sentence comes in at just 35 uses. That sentence? “And so on.” This is used by Vonnegut again in his novel Breakfast of Champions to similar effect.

  At more than 100 uses, “So it goes” represents a measurable portion of the entirety of Slaughterhouse-Five. It accounts for 2.5 % of the sentences in the entire book—about one out of every forty.

  The repetition of “So it goes” in Slaughterhouse-Five is different from the anaphora discussed above. It’s not a phrase that’s used to open consecutive sentences. However, it is emblematic of Vonnegut’s approach to writing. He used repetition and anaphora often. More than 12 % of all sentences in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five start with the same word as the previous sentence. Among all the classic and popular novels surveyed, this ranks toward the top.

  On the following page the top ten books are ranked when looking at this very basic approximation of anaphora—the percentage of sentences that begin with the same word as the previous sentence.