microblog
Negativity by the numbers
Paul Ingraham • ARCHIVEDMicroblog posts are archived and rarely updated. In contrast, most long-form articles on PainScience.com are updated regularly over the years (see updates page).
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.
