Words play an important role in anything and everything - without words, a language cannot exist (oh really, it can’t?) - at least a human language (still, oh really?)

Okay, most languages spoken by humans require the use of a lot of words. When an author writes a book, they make use of a certain kind of vocabulary almost consistently throughout their text, whether to define the tone of the book, to add a certain “feel” to it, or just something that they come up with subconsciously. It might just be worth doing a lexical analysis across various authors and figuring out which words (of course, other than commonly used ones like the, of, an, etc.) stand out specifically in a book, a series of related books, or across everything written by the same author. Maybe it’ll yield some interesting insights into the author’s life which can be correlated with their personal history (for instance, during times of trouble an author may subconsciously make use of a lot of negative adjectives throughout that period). Or it might be completely uncorrelated, who knows?

But as a reader, there are some words that definitely stick out when you read a book. Maybe it is deliberate on part of the author, or maybe they don’t realize, but such words have a profound impact on the reader’s daily vocab. For instance, I remember having Julius Caesar by Shakespeare as part of my studies while in high school, and it really had an effect on my usage of old English phrases - “Where are you?” suddenly changed to “Where art thou?”, “You too?” became “Et tu?”, and so on and so forth - and I think I still slip in some of those during casual conversations. But that’s not where it stops.

The word catch-22 was invented in…Catch-22. It has no meaning, and there’s no logical reasoning behind the word; looking for the logic is a kind of catch-22 in itself.

Readers of The Catcher in the Rye would certainly recognize their fellow readers when the word phony is tossed around a bit.

Of late, reading Infinite Jest has got me obsessed with samizdat - every new creation, whether code, written text, or digital art, is a form of samizdat now.

These are just a few examples. But there most certainly is a strange kind of obsession with such frequently used words. Nice.