What is your lexical fingerprint?
Posted by Daniel on Saturday, 4 October 2014There are a lot of words, I guess, that I am using more often than others (or necessary). The german expression "dergestalt" (a very oldfashioned way to express "in such an extent" or "in such a way"), for example, is a pretty good indicator for my authorship as I never heard anybody else saying it at all (as far as I remember).
Slate autor Matthew J.X. Mallady found himself saying "iteration" "more than any human being should" which results in his amusing article on "fingerprint words":
I’m not proud of this. I’d prefer to be a guy who can refer to a version or edition or plain old instance of something, and who doesn’t go around saying iteration over and over again. Alas, that is not me.