Texting
and tweeting have reduced our phraseology to the bare bones to communicate, but
we still require a deal of sophistication if we can get it. But what about the
English language in general? Is it a cold stiff upper-lippy language, or is it
a happy go lucky cheerful language? The French, of course, claim French for
romance, but that leaves plenty of space for English.
Kloumann
and her colleagues from the U of Vermont have been worrying during those long
Vermont winters about where does English stand on the emotional spectrum; does
it impart a neutral, negative or positive flavor to our communications? (1)
To find
out, they gleaned a set of the most commonly used words from Twitter, The New
York Times, Music Lyrics and The Google Book project so that they had covered
all levels of erudicity. Then they obtained 50 independent judgments on the
happiness rating of each word.
This
latter labor of Hercules was carried out via Amazon’s Turk. For those that had
missed some of the advances of the 21st Century, Amazon’s Turk is a service run
by Amazon for people who would like to take on some human intelligence task on
their computer at home (for money, of course) and report the results to
harassed academics or others who are too busy or grand for scut work.
The
results? Well, “laughter” was rated 8.5/10 for happy, while “terrorist” was
rated 1.3/10 on the happy scale. So after half a million human word evaluations,
they found that English was positively biased towards happy. The mean was
around 60% happy.
Of course,
the words are grabbed from a big population that doesn’t cover a fixed time.
One wonders what the happiness rating would be if the same study was done with
the words selected from those used during this American election year. Just at
the moment there doesn’t seem to be much positivity going around.
