"Wasting" and "Time" are 8,458 and 66, Respectively

I’m legitimately sorry for what I’m about to inflict on you -- namely, many hours tied up in a pretty simple web site. E.J. over at the Olive Reader -- my sister blog, in the way that nations have sister nations (we swap exchange students and stuff) -- posted today about Word Count, a site that lists, in easily searchable fashion, the 86,800 most frequently used words in the English language. In order.

“The” is first, and so on.

Pessimism is 20,386. Optimism is 7,960. That’s refreshing.

Peanut is 24,806. Butter is 4,091. I would have thought they’d be closer together.

This blog’s title, represented by the rank of each word, is represented thus:

5, 419, 96, 2, 109, 1716

Just for the exercise, I wanted to try to make a sentence (or two or three) out of 40 words -- the 20 most common and the 20 least common. So I set down the top 20: the, of, and, to, a, in, that, it, is, was, I, for, on, you, he, be, with, as, by, at.

Lots of ballast there.

Then I set down the last 20: conquistador, recrossed, workless, carniola, tangency, multilingualism, lauro, golgotha, homemakers, savills, tella, blick, inro, historiarum, moyne, criers, allocatively, chalkis, sibomana, tarrow.

Ruh-roh. At least 10 of those words look like Jupiterese to me.

And now I know what you’re thinking: What the hell is wrong with me, that I would be looking up these ridiculous things and creating these pointless exercises I'll never finish? Well, go to the site and then see how superior you are. I dare you.