> No one really knows why it's true. This is what is so bizzare. We do know why it's true; the mystery is just pumped up in the press. I have only skimmed the

> No one really knows why it's true. This is what is so bizzare. We do know why it's true; the mystery is just pumped up in the press. I have only skimmed the paper, but apparently Belevitch [0] showed (in 1959!) that Zipf's law and Mandelbrot's Law [1] are essentially just first-order and second-order approximations, respectively, for a large class of probability distributions, so no wonder it is so ubiquitous. [0] Belevitch, V. (1959). On the statistical laws of linguistic distributions. Annales de la Societe Scientifique de Bruxelles, 73(3), 301–326. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%E2%80%93Mandelbrot_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%E2%80%93Mandelbrot_law