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Negativity by the numbers

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Occurrences of the word “unfortunately” on PainScience.com: 450! That’s a lot of bad news. Hell, maybe I really am negative?!

But wait … there’s 580 uses of “fortunately”!

Context: I get accused of negativity a lot. Three times this week, and it’s been a slow week for it.

More context: as the years tick by and the site gets ever more ginormous, I am increasingly entertained by “stats” like this. Because I can easily search the text of the entire site, I now know all kinds of weird things, like the number of times I have used the words like “underwhelming” (97), “bollocks” (45), or ginormous (10). My most overused word? That has got to be “generally” at 692 usages, exacerbated by 372 uses of “in general”! I do periodic purges — looks like it’s time for another.

PainSci Member Login » Submit your email to unlock member content. If you can’t remember/access your registration email, please contact me. ~ Paul Ingraham, PainSci Publisher