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Talk:Essay:Best New Conservative Words (view source)
Revision as of 03:44, September 13, 2013
, 03:44, September 13, 2013→Statistical approach: illustrative table assuming arithmetic growth
:::::But dictionaries don't look like that, do they? If this trend truly exists independent of Mr. Schlafly's own personal word selection talents, then there should be an objective standard for determining the political etymology of a word. What is that standard? --[[User:DonnyC|DonnyC]] 10:59, 12 September 2013 (EDT)
:::::But dictionaries don't look like that, do they? If this trend truly exists independent of Mr. Schlafly's own personal word selection talents, then there should be an objective standard for determining the political etymology of a word. What is that standard? --[[User:DonnyC|DonnyC]] 10:59, 12 September 2013 (EDT)
::::::I agree with Mr. Schlafly that the English language probably grows arithmetically. The question is how to control for that fact. Let's assume that English grows at 5,000 words per century:
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
!Century
!# Cons. Words
!# English Words
!Ratio
|-
|1600s
|32
|200,000
|.00016
|-
|1700s
|64
|205,000
|.000156
|-
|1800s
|127
|210,000
|.000648
|-
|1900s
|256
|215,000
|.00119
|-
|2000s
|27 (preliminary)
|215,500
|.0001253
|}
I am assuming that if 5,000 words are added each century, 500 would be added per decade in an arithmetic growth model. If conservative thought is taking over the hearts and minds of English speaking people, one would expect the ratio of conservative words/total English vocabulary to grow, not just the absolute number of conservative words to grow. (This is an illustration; I would need to have actual statistics on dictionary sizes through history to plot the two effects over time.) Thanks, [[User:Wschact|Wschact]] 23:44, 12 September 2013 (EDT)