美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve' Crunches The (Literary) Numbers

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Bear with me because we're going to spend a minute or so talking about statistical¹ analysis, you know, the kind used to analyze² data and predict who might win March Madness or an election. But what if we used data to look at literature? NPR's Glen Weldon tells us about a new book called "Nabokov's Favorite Color Is Mauve" (ph) and the patterns it reveals.

GLEN WELDON, BYLINE³: A statistician - his name is Ben Blatt - loaded thousands of novels into a huge database and crunched⁴ the numbers. One thing those numbers show is that male novelists write overwhelmingly about men. Women read about male and female characters roughly equally. Another thing - cliches.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Now or never.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: With all my heart.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Nick of time.

WELDON: Writers are supposed to avoid cliches like the plague. Who uses the fewest? Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Jane Austen, all women. The top three cliche⁵ abusers? Men - Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, and coming in at number one, James Patterson, whose go-to cliche, believe it or not, is...

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Believe it or not.

WELDON: Let's talk adverbs.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Happily.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Nearly.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Suddenly.

WELDON: Your teachers warned you not to use too many. And it turns out their advice holds up. Of the novels that dominate the lists of great books, 2 out of 4 contain few adverbs. Now, this stuff might not surprise you exactly, but it's fun to see your vague notions about writing turned into stark⁶ numerical facts. Here's one. Every author has a word that they use much more than others. Here's Jane Austen's.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Civility.

WELDON: Makes sense, right? How about Herman Melville?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Whale.

WELDON: You probably saw that coming. Here's Agatha Christie's three favorite words.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Inquest. Frightful⁷. Alibi⁸.

WELDON: And as for Tom Wolfe, his favorite word is [expletive]. Ben Blatt's book gets its title from Vladimir Nabokov's favorite word - mauve. He used it at a rate 44 times higher than it's found in other people's writing. That's a lot of mauve. I'd say something about purple prose here but that would be a cliche. I'm Glen Weldon.