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On authors favorite words: "The words must be used in half an author’s books, at least once per hundred thousand words; they can’t be proper nouns... Isaac Asim

On authors favorite words: "The words must be used in half an author’s books, at least once per hundred thousand words; they can’t be proper nouns... Isaac Asimov prefers 'terminus,'" "terminus" is the proper name of a location in Asimov's Foundation series. Did Ben Blatt's analysis fail to account for common words used as proper nouns, or does Asimov use terminus outside the Foundation series?

__s 9y ago
Apparently the word has to appear in half their books. I don't know if he took the whole of Asimov's 900+ books
- ashark 9y ago
  Wikipedia puts him at 40 novels, enough short stories for maybe 40 short to mid-sized collections (382 stories), 280 non-fic books, and 146 as editor or annotator, which surely don't count. 504 books included edited/annotated. If one were only using fiction and excluding duplicates (I'm sure there were collections of short stories of his which were mostly or entirely repeats from earlier collections) then that's maybe 80 volumes of unique material (I'm sure there were tons of dupes in various story collections), tops. They'd easily fit in 40-50 fairly ordinary vols. I bet if you were willing to put multiple "books" in one (a lot of his juvenilia are really short) and probably 10-15 LOA-style volumes. Not that that's a small amount of fiction to have written, but even including the non-fic it's nowhere near 900.
  - __s 9y ago
    Yes, seems my off-the-cuff memory's is counting an individual short story as a book & even then doubled the value http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html
nitrogen 9y ago
Another dead comment made a similar point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886678
petters 9y ago
This is a really good point. It seems likely that proper nouns were not taken into account.

__s 9y ago

Apparently the word has to appear in half their books. I don't know if he took the whole of Asimov's 900+ books

ashark 9y ago
Wikipedia puts him at 40 novels, enough short stories for maybe 40 short to mid-sized collections (382 stories), 280 non-fic books, and 146 as editor or annotator, which surely don't count. 504 books included edited/annotated. If one were only using fiction and excluding duplicates (I'm sure there were collections of short stories of his which were mostly or entirely repeats from earlier collections) then that's maybe 80 volumes of unique material (I'm sure there were tons of dupes in various story collections), tops. They'd easily fit in 40-50 fairly ordinary vols. I bet if you were willing to put multiple "books" in one (a lot of his juvenilia are really short) and probably 10-15 LOA-style volumes. Not that that's a small amount of fiction to have written, but even including the non-fic it's nowhere near 900.
- __s 9y ago
  Yes, seems my off-the-cuff memory's is counting an individual short story as a book & even then doubled the value http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html

nitrogen 9y ago

Another dead comment made a similar point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886678

petters 9y ago

This is a really good point. It seems likely that proper nouns were not taken into account.