Word Fans, I have done it! All the way from “cellar” to “tobacco-jar“, I have scanned for all the food words, common and uncommon, and entered them into the concordance. I’m certain to have missed some, and I am humbly ready to call this my First Pass. Alert Readers who put me wise to food words I have missed will have a verse written in their honor in the style of the Tra-la-la-lalley Elves.
Let it be noted that I have already had a good argument with myself over “supplies”, and have decided that it’s not a food word. It is used in “food-supplies”, which is counted separately, and in all other instances can indicate “bandages” as well as it stands for “food”.
Next I will make some lovely graphs of food words. I’m interested in their frequency and location in the text; I also have an idea in the back of my mind to do a deeper analysis including a negative valence for those times that food words indicate a lack of food.
As I made this first pass, I also took the chance to improve my file of the text. I’ve eliminated many of the phrase-breaks which left only one-word phrases, fussed with punctuation breaks, and started keeping an eye out for use or non-use of a marked subjunctive.