in lieu of actual content...

[shadowscast]

Sometimes when I'm editing a long story, and I'm looking at it in one window (say, in displayed html format) but editing it in some other window (the text editor), and I need to find a particular place in the text, I'll use the "find" function to get there quickly. Usually I do this by picking one word in the surrounding paragraph that I'm pretty sure hasn't been used anywhere else in the text. If that doesn't work then I'll do a two-word combo, but usually it's possible with just one word.

This makes me think about how many words there are in the English language.

That sure is a lot of words.

But I'm really terrible at Scrabble!

Comments

[tarotgal]

It's very true... there are definitely a lot of words out there! My newest favorite is twickle. (Okay, so it's not in the dictionary but it's in plant books... it's just too much fun to say)

Clearly my vocabulary is nothing as spectacular as yours since I usually pick a whole 5 or 6-word phrase when doing that. :-)

Although, I do it the opposite way more often than not, needing to search in the HTML because I already made the document and then found a mistake. Then when I'm searching the HTML source code and I pick a whole phrase, invariably it starts on one line in the code and ends on another and then doesn't show up when I do a find. And then I pull my hair out.

I'll have to be more careful with the words I choose and try to pick out unique ones from now on.

[shadowscast.livejournal.com]

Hee! It's not so much the vocabulary, as just finding something that didn't come up in the rest of the story. Like, I just found a paragraph where Spike made a sarcastic reference to the Pope. The Pope did not come up again in the story!

... You can't word-wrap your HTML code in your editor?

[punksta1978.livejournal.com]

I'm really hoping the sarcastic comment about the Pope makes the cut!

[shadowscast.livejournal.com]

*blush* Well, actually in the case in point I was just working on the "Sock Puppet" DVD commentary. The sarcastic comment about the Pope is therefore already safely in the final text.

[punksta1978.livejournal.com]

D'oh! You'd think I would have known that with how many times I've read Sock Puppet!

[shapinglight]

I'm terrible at scrabble too! Everyone always tells me I shouldn't be because I'm an English graduate - but I am.

[shadowscast.livejournal.com]

I have much better vocabulary and spelling than my husband, but he still kicks my ass at Scrabble!

I just don't seem to have the knack of looking at a jumble of letters and seeing the potential words.

[shapinglight]

I'm exactly the same! How weird.

[shadowscast.livejournal.com]

I could, however, with a pencil and paper and pocket calculator, tell you exactly how many distinct permutations of letters are in any given Scrabble hand!

[shapinglight]

Heh! Definitely couldn't do that.

Non-sequitur fact!

[androidlovesong.livejournal.com]

There are a greater variety of words in Don Quixote than in The Bible.

Re: Non-sequitur fact!

[shadowscast.livejournal.com]

I think that was perfectly on-topic! Also rather interesting! (Though it does immediately beg the question: was the study looking at the documents in their original language(s), or in translation? Because if it was looking at the original texts, I would have thought the Bible would get quite a boost from being written in three different languages to start with.)

Re: Non-sequitur fact!

[androidlovesong.livejournal.com]

That is a good point, and since I can't actually find any source for this "fact" on google that I thought I knew, perhaps it is either 1) true with qualifiers i.e. in translation or 2) completely and utterly not a fact at all.

I shouldn't speak.