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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2154 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anyone know of a list of words by their population-level familiarity? For instance, % Americans who know what a rollercoaster is, a snowshoe, a thermos.

@self_made_human had a great idea. The paper from which those two lists (words many women, but few men know, and vice versa), also compares words specific to the UK and to the US. Databases which you are after are available as the "supplementary material" on the page of the paper and at https://osf.io/g4xrt/.

Can someone explain why this paper is not hot garbage?

It looks like their methodology was the following:

  • Give people a set with some words and some nonwords
  • Ask them, for each, to say if they know it or not
  • Give them a "score" as feedback based on ("known" words) - (falsely "known" nonwords)
  • ...Otherwise throw out any calibration information from people claiming to "know" nonwords, and just assume that they actually know every word they say they know?

Behold my shocked Pikachu face that they found an absurdly unrealistically high number of people who "know" really obscure words. (Just look at that histogram!) No, I do not believe for one second that 55% of men know the word "aileron" or even that 58% know what "azimuth" means. This is not measuring how many people know a word -- neither in the sense that they could give a definition, nor even in the sense that they could vaguely gesture at the correct meaning. It is, at most, a measure of how likely people are to guess that something might be a word, which is a totally different thing!

Well, unless I am completely misreading the paper, anyway. Anyone want to point out where my assessment above is wrong?

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