December 10, 2004

From dude to duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude

As today's final (?) contribution to dude science, we take a look at the relative frequency of dude as spelled with different numbers of u's, advancing an area of inquiry pioneered here.

Here's the table (as of yesterday morning's Google counts):

u count
Spelling
WhG
1 dude
7,460,000
2 duude
5,130
3 duuude
11,200
4 duuuude
10,100
5 duuuuude
6,370
6 duuuuuude
3,980
7 duuuuuuude
4,450
8 duuuuuuuude
3,280
9 duuuuuuuuude
2,220
10 duuuuuuuuuude
1,770
11 duuuuuuuuuuude
1,340
12 duuuuuuuuuuuude
1,150
13 duuuuuuuuuuuuude
1,080
14 duuuuuuuuuuuuuude
550
15 duuuuuuuuuuuuuuude
400
16 duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude
336

I'll spare you the spectral analysis of the apparent resonance near <7 u>.

Mindful of the broader vistas of linguistic science, I'll end with two-dimensional table of variant spellings of wassup: thus the entry of 465 in row 3, column 2 means that "wasssuup" (with 3 s's and 2 u's) got 465 hits.

  1 u 2 u 3 u 4 u 5 u 6 u 7 u 8 u
1 s
19,300
1,650
529
590
215
126
74
56
2 s
266,000
10,400
1,270
369
326
188
147
124
3 s
5,650
465
463
253
148
60
28
905
4 s
716
86
520
199
90
48
59
10
5 s
4,230
44
71
77
62
37
14
6
6 s
15,400
12
27
32
31
53
36
12
7 s
14,300
3
16
33
17
9
26
7
8 s
1,630
1
5
13
12
3
14
7

The resonance near <4s 3u> awaits explanation. Could this be a sign of the hip quark?

[Update: Vardibidian emailed to say

I'm afraid your two-dimensional depiction of wassup is woefully inadequate. For instance, you list 463 ghits for 'wasssuuup' but the more usual spelling, at 538 ghits, is 'waaasssuuup'. On the other hand, where there are 199 ghits for 'wassssuuuup' there are only 19 for waaaassssuuuup'. There are 3,050 for 'waassuup' to 10,400 for 'wassuup'. So there is some sort of resonance at 3/3/3.

There are also 317 ghits for 'waassuupp' and 339 for 'wasssuuuppp', so even a 3-d model would not fully express the resonances.

Well sure, it's really a five-dimensional space, I agree. If someone will volunteer to determine the values in all (say) 20x20x20x20x20 cells (all 3.2M of them), I'll gladly link to a post on the subject :-). Even 6x6x6x6x6 (7,776 cells, which could be harvested in 8 days via the Google API) might be interesting... especially if accompanied by a model of the underlying process that fits the data well. ]

 

Posted by Mark Liberman at December 10, 2004 08:37 AM