We all have vocal and writing ticks, whether we choose to believe it or not. Listen to your friends talk, those who always say something is amazing or super--two popular words that people rely on like a crutch these days for lack of having any other way to express something is wonderful or surprising.
Famous writers throughout history have had ticks as well, words and phrases they constantly rely on, which data journalist Ben Blatt found out by examining the numbers. Blatt calls them "cinnamon words," a hat tip to Ray Bradbury who once said his favorite word to use in writing was cinnamon.
In his new book, Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, Blatt says he found the cinnamon words of many famous writers, as he tells PRI in the interview below.
Jane Austen, for example, leans on civility, fancying and imprudence consistently. Dan Brown? Grail, masonic and pyramid. Other quirks were found by Blatt, like how the word she is used only once in the entirety of The Hobbit, or that James Patterson seemingly uses 160 clichés per 100,000 words in his famed Alex Cross detective novels. (Of course, Patterson really doesn't write his books, so much as his collaborator, so I'm not sure who's to blame there.)
160 clichés, though--that's amazing. That takes a super effort.
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