All roads lead to...

About a week and a half ago Polyglot Conspiracy posted a list of the keywords that have led readers to her blog. It's a pretty good list. Then just earlier this week Mr. Verb reported finding a new eggcorn in his keyword list. One surfer used "lame mans terms" probably intending "layman's terms" (tho 'intending' is problematic because of the nature of snowclones).

Getting a good statistics counter makes for some fascinating graphs and a lot of easily wasted time. You have to wonder what some people are expecting to find. Several months ago I mentioned that one searcher stumbled on my site asking "what's a good dare for a gf?" I'm not sure he got any ideas from the blog but he might have been curious to try some of that freaky 'uvular frication' we like to talk about.

This is a cheap post. Still I'll not post all search terms because most of them make perfect sense. Quite interesting are the common search terms that bring in a steady flow of readers. Some of the most common search terms and phrases:

• supercalifragilisticexbealidocious lyrics [and this is by far the most common spelling--of course that's the spelling I commented on so I might be missing all the searches for supercalifragilisticexpialidocious]


• pronunciation of nabokov


• pronunciation of favre


• houshmandzadeh pronunciation


• adewale ogunleye


• -ology words [often asking for a list]


• hoi vey [about 20 times more common than 'oy vey']


• alphabetical principle


• jeep, q-tip aspirin [and several other brand names that illustrate eponymy]


• did alex trebek say the new world translation was the most accurate [this common query is apparently related to some Jehova's Witnesses propaganda claiming that the translation is so widely regarded to be superior that it even made it onto Jeopardy! as a question. I'm not sure if this is official JW propaganda or just a folk-argument]

Two of the most common searches since this blog got going:

• howl /wail /pee /sweating /working /scream meaning /laugh like a banshee


• ironic vs ironical [and often the question 'is ironical a word?'

Some typos searches I don't quite understand:

• "colorless green ideals bade" [what does this mean?]


• "3 i's lesson plan for high school english the topic is verb" [what are the 3 i's?]

Some searches are extremely clear--tho I'm surprised someone felt the need to ask so specific a question:

• "what part of speech is "very" in the sentence: after the game tome was very tired."

And then there are those searches that I just don't know what the searcher could have been hoping to find.

• i have to pee

Me too. but I already know what to do about it.