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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1986 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?

That list is hilarious. The male words seem to be mostly technical (thermistor, teraflop), scientific (boson, piezoelectricity) or relating to fighting (howitzer, bushido). Also, the inclusion of katana, bushido and yakuza makes us look like a bunch of weebs.

Meanwhile, the female list seems to be almost entirely relating to fabric and clothing. Of the female list, the only ones I can say I knew a specific definition for were kohl and doula. The rest I could vaguely recognise as relating to fabric or can see the etymology without knowing the English meaning (voile - veil, boucle - buckle). Half the words seem to be French loanwords.

Apparently a pessary is some kind of gynocological medical device and not something religious or funereal, as I would have guessed.

I am reminded of this classic:

So I was feeling pretty good about equality. Then I decided to calculate the ‘most masculine’ and ‘most feminine’ colors. I was looking for the color names most disproportionately popular among each group; that is, the names that the most women came up with compared to the fewest men (or vice versa).

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women:

  • Dusty Teal
  • Blush Pink
  • Dusty Lavender
  • Butter Yellow
  • Dusky Rose

Okay, pretty flowery, certainly. Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe. Well, let’s take a look at the other list.

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men:

  • Penis
  • Gay
  • WTF
  • Dunno
  • Baige

I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”. And keep in mind, this is based on the number of unique people who answered the color, not the number of times they typed it. This isn’t just the effect of a couple spammers. In fact, this is after the spamfilter.

I weep for my gender.

Kohl seems likely to be picking up on women recognizing the name of the store not the black powder that I had to look up.

It's makeup, and while more associated with old or non-western forms of makeup (often containing lead) a quick search finds some modern eyeliner using it as a label as well. It was one of the few I recognized on the female side when I first saw it (along with taffeta and jacquard) due to its use in fantasy fiction. I think more would recognize it from makeup or the history of makeup rather than from the name of the department store.

words specific to the UK and to the US

What do they call dodgems in the US, then?

Bumper cars

Neat.

Apparently the least known word is stotinka, the cent-analogue for the lev (the currency of Bulgaria). The first one I knew was the tenth least known, witenagemot. Helps to have played Crusader Kings I guess.

I guess that's where Rowling conjured up the Wizengamot from.

I want people to know that it's possible to make fandom.com more readable than an average website. It just takes uBlock Origin and a couple dozen custom filters.

The closest I can think of is that chart that compares words overwhelmingly known only by one of the two sexes. If the dataset for that was known, I'd presume you could kinda use it for the same purpose for the general population.

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