ScottMcJ: Alphabetology III

May 15, 2002

Alphabetology III

Handy!
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Finally, the last bits on Alphabetology.

The subconscious picks words based on the occurrence of letters in the words that more naturally accord with your personality. If you are a blend-in-with-the-crowd guy, you would shy away from using a lot of x's. If you are perhaps narcissistic, you might overuse i's. If you are an outdoorsy type, there may be a propensity towards r's. And so forth.

The Letters, concluded...

The B is a bubbly friendly sort of fellow, industrious, and maybe perhaps a little hickish. You see, with no mental stretch at all, the B in overalls mending a barbed wire fence. What makes Maybury the small town that it is? Much more than Otis, it is Aunt Bee; the essence of small-town living.

Overusing the B shows a cheerful, if slightly rustic, view of the world. You are content with the small things and do not worry too much about problems outside your immediate experience. Self-reliant, with a diy inclination. The only worry is whether you are ignoring some of the complexities of life to your detriment

Underusing the B is for those in a hurry to divorce the past. You like to browse The Sharper Image, don't you? You neither know nor care what a thresher is, but you'll bet it is filthy and greasy. Maybe the past has lessons to teach, but you are not listening.

The X is the bad boy of the alphabet. Ex-this, and ex-that; the X doesn't care. Use them and leave them. X is delighted to be another euphemism for sexual intercourse, but you do not see any x's in 'commitment', oh no. Why the chicks dig the x's of the alphabet is beyond me, but what are you gonna do?

Overusing the x shows a voracious appetite for sensual experience along with a tendency to avoid long-term responsibilities. There is something lovely about leaving problems behind and taking on whole new experiences. But are you really happy with all the smoking bridges left behind?

You cannot underuse x. It does not appear frequently enough.

The K is a follower letter. It is not a terribly creative letter, though it is very well intentioned and has no problem helping a good idea get stated. Blunt in speech, the K says what is on its mind without circumlocution.

Overusing the K are those with a keen sense of what is right and worthy to dedicate themselves to, but who rarely think up the ideas themselves. You collect friends who are engaged in many activities that you can jump in on as you recognize fits for your talents.

You cannot underuse the k when it only appears 3 times per 1000 letters.

Oh, the poor Q. It hides its inherent insecurity and loneliness under an irritating and pretentious veneer. By insisting on dominating the front of words that it appears on, and always dragging the u along as a sycophant, it hopes to fool us into not noticing its deeper issues. And we put up with it because, really, who cannot sympathize with that? That and it is worth a heck of a lot of points in Scrabble.

Overusing the q shows that you have parts of your life where you are feeling quite lonely and insecure. You probably have excellent disguises in place and no one would think that you really feel the way that you do. Which is nice and everything, but how are you supposed to purge your issues when they are always under wraps?

You cannot underuse the q.

That snotty little iconoclastic J. You just know it is sneering at you for squandering it on Jar or Jab instead of jejunum or jacinths in games of Scrabble. So many points for such a nondescript letter in the middle of the alphabet. It has really gone to J's head. It was not always that way. J used to be very nice before Scrabble was invented. Times change.

Overusing the j indicates that maybe you have let your successes in life go to your head. Sure, maybe you did win the pie-eating contest in '93, but by constantly wearing that medal and incessantly telling the story of your subsequent sexual conquest of the 4H matron from the butter churn booth, you are only alienating everyone. Do people know the real you behind your accomplishments and opinions?

You cannot underuse the j.

The Z is stylish, rebellious, carefree. The Z is the trust fund child of the alphabet. The useless playboy son, perfectly happy never to do a lick of work and spend its life lazing around in the Starbucks at the end of the alphabet.

Overusing the Z indicates a lethargic nature. It is beyond not wanting to work. The very concept of working just seems like a horrifying waste of a beautiful life. So much thinking and exploring to do. Who would want to spend that indoors behind a desk?

You cannot underuse the z.

Frequency Calculations

E, T, N, and R, the four most popular letters, comprise a full 1/3rd of every thousand letters. That is a lot of load to carry. They are doing almost triple the duty of the average letter.

By contrast, B, X, K, Q, J, and Z, the bottom six letters, are carrying less than 2% of the load per thousand letters.

Which makes calculating thresholds for over/underuse difficult. You cannot just say a flat 150% means overuse, for example, because that would be 3 J's, as opposed to 195 E's. Hardly fair.

Okay, so here is what I would propose. Taking the table below and the text sample someone inputs, do a count for each letter.

Normalize the count to 1000 letters; occurrences*1000/totalletters.

If letter is < normal, then (under-occurrences)/normal.

If letter is > normal, then (occurrences-over)/normal.

Take the top five percentages in order and compile their matching highly scientific personality indicators into an essay which will offer a complex and layered analysis of the submitter's personality, the results of which will surely save decades of expensive and painful therapy.

	Under	Normal	Over	Normal Dev
E	111	130	150	0.15
T	79	93	107	0.15
N	68	78	88	0.125
R	67	77	87	0.125
I	65	74	83	0.125
O	65	74	83	0.125
A	64	73	82	0.125
S	55	63	71	0.125
D	40	44	48	0.1
H	32	35	39	0.1
L	32	35	39	0.1
C	27	30	33	0.1
F	25	28	31	0.1
P	24	27	30	0.1
U	24	27	30	0.1
M	23	25	28	0.1
Y	16	19	22	0.15
G	14	16	18	0.15
W	14	16	18	0.15
V	11	13	15	0.15
B	7	9	11	0.2
X		5	7	0.4
K		Posted by ScottMcJ at May 15, 2002 04:22 PM \| TrackBack --> Comments? Permalink: www.scottmcj.com/default.shtml?ID=000383 Email scottmcj hat scottmcj daht com : © scottmcj And god bless Moveable Type and DreamHost