Attractive Aversions

Mark Liberman of Language Log posted about Word Attraction today, which caused me to think about any word attractions I might have. First, to keep this geek on topic, I figured I should analyze my sent mail (which only goes back to 2003) for commonly used words. Right off the bat I expect to see very uninteresting words (conjunctions, articles, etc), so I'll need to cull some. I think just eyeballing this list should be good enough to find any words that I routinely come back in my electronic speech.

I found libgmail, which is a python module that claims to access your gmail account. It also claims support for Apps For Your Domain. So far, it's unable to retrieve any of my messages, so I may have to fall back to regular old IMAP. Or maybe I'll try to fix libgmail.

Mark also linked to some of their earlier articles about Word Aversion, and especially the interesting note that there is a tendency for Avoiders to be teased by their so-called friends. This struck me because I happen to know which words will make Ms. X's skin crawl - her word aversions. Just in case her students come across this post, I won't let them out of the bag. But, I definitely had some fun with that in High School.