On Verbs
Hello y'all,
A pretty long time ago, theohara did this funny, funny post on word choices in fanfic. If you haven't read it, you definitely should. ( http://theohara.livejournal.com/203973.html)
Anyway, ever since she did that, I've been wanting to check my own stories. And yesterday, I finally did.
So, I copy-pasted all my love scenes (along with some of the heavier make-out sessions) into a nice, long text file and ran it through Word Count Machine 2.5.1 (which was a bit crappy since I was only willing to get the free demo version and didn't get the nice export to Excell feature). Out came all sorts of interesting information.
For easier view, I combined entries for similar words (hand/hands, eye/eyes/eyelash/eyebrow, touch/touched/touching and so on), took away all the grammatical ones (such as 'the') and excluded all entries that appeared less than 10 times. Since there were about 3300 different words in my search, I narrowed it down into categories as well.
Ok, here we go!
BODIES & PARTS
(words related to...)
401 -- Mouth, breath, voice
363 -- Hands, fingers, arms
354 -- Face and neck
259 -- Whole body, skin
150 -- Eyes
116 -- Upper body
110 -- Legs and feet
19 -- Naughty parts
So, yes. 92,7% of all nouns relating to the body are waist-up. Guess we can leave the whole 'ass or face'-debate for solved, then. This is actually rather scary in all its Freudian revelations. And while we're on the revealing track...
SEDUCTION OF THE SENSES
(Verbs related to the 5 senses + 1)
1935 -- Touchy feely
537 -- Taste, speech and oral sensations
363 -- Mental seduction
152 -- Eye candy
30 -- Hearing
0 -- Smelly stuff
When putting together this table, I actually went "Wait a second, isn't there a fifth sense? I know the mental aspect isn't officially one..." Guess this explains why I have no problem what so ever to have sex in the morning after a big party when everyone is smelly and hungover. Yes, well.
An ex-boyfriend once said (quite amazed, apparently he hadn't run into a creature such as me before) that I was incredibly 'tactille' ('tactile' in English?), i.e. that I explored the world by touching stuff. This is pretty true, I do touch everything, from velvet drapes to weird-looking pebbles on the ground. Still, the 64,7% leaves me a bit shocked. :-)
To be continued in the next post as this is too heavy for LJ to handle...