Update 2016.06.28: I’ve added the “food” tag here, since the party thought of shooting squirrels to relieve their hunger.
I am reminded of Chapter 1 of Ivanhoe in which we discuss how a food animal is called by its Old English name when the peasant herds it and by its French name when the nobility eat it.
Almost two hundred mentions, not including Gollum’s special pronunciation of the plural. I’ve made them food because Gollum thinks they are so, but that’s only mentioned in o5.012.
I have debated with myself for a day on whether these Gollum-pronunciations go in the same entry as all other goblins. In the end, I decided that it would be helpful someday to a fellow scholar to see these separated out. They are food because Gollum likes to eat them when he can.
It’s not an uncommon word – but we include it because of how Gollum pronounces the plural! It’s a sound-play word!
I look forward to the day when I can add all the eggs in the work, not just the uncommonly spelled ones.
2016.03.25 – and that happy day has come! Eggs seems to be evenly distributed, as closely as such non-robust things can be.
Word fans, did you see what I saw?
The food words generally decrease over the course of the book. We predicted that. If we read the dip in Chapter 1 as an abundance of common food words and the spike in chapter 6 as a spike in thinking about food they weren’t getting, it’s a trend.
Then there was the archaic word graph, which broadly rises.
What if we were to flip over the food word graph? I suppose we could call it a hunger graph.
And then if we put those graphs on top of one another…
We could, if we squint hard, call those matching trajectories. If you had asked me last week if I had a prediction about this, I would probably have said, “Sure, as food and comfort go down across the book, archaism and lofty things increase, I’ll put a nickel on that.” What piques my curiosity this morning? Where and why these lines diverge from the predicted pattern.
Chapter 1? I believe that’s a straightforward “many food words here are common” phenomenon and that the beginning and end of the chapter are my guides for where to think of the blue line.
Chapter 4? Oh, yes. Goblins. No archaic words at all. All current-use. And food? No. Goblins do not serve tea. Or supper. Or even cram. Modern words, no manners. Uncouth, uncultured, ignorant.
Chapter 6 I chalk up to another measurement anomaly – the blue line shows us words about foods which the company is not eating.
But oh, yes, the beginning of Chapter 9. Archaic words and food (remember, the blue line going down means hunger goes away). Bilbo embraced being a hero and we enter Thranduil’s realm. Spiders talked about food, elves treated their prisoners humanely. In fact,
[08.144] … They gave [Thorin] food and drink, plenty of both, if not very fine; for Wood-elves were not goblins, and were reasonably well-behaved even to their worst enemies,
Goblins are the contrast to elves? Many scholars more learned than I have held forth on this topic. I present this little lexomic morsel to nourish the discussion.
The region of densest Food words comes, as any of us might have predicted, in Chapter 1: The Unexpected Party.
The unexpected dip in Chapter 1 comes just as the dwarves begin to help with the washing up. Remember that there are plenty of food words from among our favorite and most-used vocabulary which are not tagged in this analysis – like chicken. This dip graphically reminds us that we are only looking at a rolling average, not at the point itself.
The end of the Unexpected Party, with its orders for breakfast, contains the highest uncommon food average in the book – and the beginning of the next chapter continues the trend: trolls have much to say about food (mutton, manflesh). Bilbo’s not even thinking about food in Riddles in the Dark, of course, and chapter 6 is mostly about the lack of food and the presence only of tiny scrubby herbs.
[06.039] As they went on Bilbo looked from side to side for something to eat; but the blackberries were still only in flower, and of course there were no nuts, not even hawthorn-berries. He nibbled a bit of sorrel, and he drank from a small mountain-stream that crossed the path, and he ate three wild strawberries that he found on its bank, but it was not much good.
After that? Not much food. I’ve noted the relief at Beorn’s home, in the deer-shooting scene of Mirkwood, and before the Wood-elves’ feast. Perhaps the discussion of “cram” is not so much a relief as dry, and possibly tasteless, fact.
(update 2015.07.02)
There are many fewer uncommon food words than simply uncommon words, therefore our graph is more granular, but the data were analyzed in the same manner, with a rolling average across a window of five thousand words.
Our y-scale – average number of food words – is much smaller than the scale for the uncommon words. It doesn’t even reach 0.01, and we talked about all common words being around 0.04 in Chapter 1. Clearly if we scrunched the food words down to the same scale as all the uncommon words, we would barely notice their line. So that we can see variation in food words, we’ll keep the graph at the same size as we superimpose it on the overall uncommon words.
To find my list of food words, just follow the “food” tag or click here.
I know for a fact the chicken and apples are in the Ten Thousand most common words – I challenge my fellow scholars to tag and analyze all the food words of The Hobbit!
Donkeys have earned the “food” tag, as goblins and Smaug consider them tasty.
“Parched” is among the Hundred Thousand, but our form “parchingly” is not (nor is “parch”, although “parching” is!). “Parchingly” is a derivative form attested in the 1800s, and here’s our quotation:
1851 H. Melville Moby-Dick ci. 497 Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading.
I believe that Mr. Melville and I have different tastes. Not only do I love myself a good logarithm table or a nice analysis of variance to while away the long winter nights, I find Mr. Melville himself a bit sere. I may have written a few rash things in a high school English essay on the subject.
Update 2016.06.28: I am adding the “food” tag, as the word is related to thirst and nothing else.
“parching, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 1 June 2015.
words that you were saying 