"And as always, thanks for wa-aaait a minute" Seriously - it was a glorious crescendo through the whole thing. I loved it.
Yeah it was fun. Then I punched myself in the gut by actually watching all of the videos of "Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows". If you liked this video, I highly recommend them.
You know how if you say a word enough times you can kinda lose track of what it means and it just sounds strange? That list of the most used words, especially the top ten-twenty or so, is full of small, slippery, hard to define words. I've got a half-developed idea that relates frequency of word use to it's specificity of definition, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to phrase any of it in a way that makes sense.
For language, sometimes I'll change subject so I don't seem too tacky by repeating the same word, such as not wanting to say 'sauce' fifty times in one paragraph, even if I have good reason to. "I said something nice to the last 4/5 (80%) people, so person #5, you suck, because Zipf."
That makes me a bit curious if purposefully breaking the zipf is somehow unpleasant. Like you said, you'd think twice about saying 'sauce' a bunch of times in a row, but we don't give a second thought to repeating common words. Kind of freaky to think that we have some sort of unconscious bias.
This is awesome, thanks for sharing!! If anyone is more interested in information theory in language more generally, I highly highly recommend Aylett & Turk 2004, Levy 2008, Jaeger 2010 and for narrower topics Smith & Levy 2013 and Jaeger & Snider 2013.