You know how sometimes a song gets stuck in your head? That happens to me all the time. This story is not about that. This is about books. Actually audiobooks. Well, actually about a word that I’ve mispronounced (in my head) my whole life.
I’ve been listening to a lot of books lately. I still read the old fashioned way, but I’ve been enjoying listening while I cook/bake, drive, fold clothes, do jigsaw puzzles, and such.
A few months ago, I heard the reader say the word ‘detritus’ and I laughed out loud! How could the producers let that mispronunciation go through. Was it too expensive or hard to fix/edit? I promptly forgot about it. But then, the next book I chose had that same word in it, and it was pronounced the same was as the previous book. And so, I looked it up.
What’s really strange though, is that the word detritus was in the next 6 books I’ve listened to, including: The Latecomer (2x) , What Happened to the Bennetts, Nightcrawling. Strange, right? I know I’m more aware of it now, but still it seems odd that the word is in every book I hear and I don’t recall ever hearing the word spoken before.
Because I’m a researcher, this made me wonder if usage of the word has become more frequent. It hasn’t changed all that much over the past year, but is up 235% over the previous year.
Also interesting that it’s widespread with nearly 150K authors in the past year.
I haven’t seen a query with Tumblr as the primary platform in a very long time, if ever. Next are Twitter, News, Reddit. Those make sense to me. A lot of the content is about war, water quality/oceans, and a meme that went around recently. {The meme answers the question, why Tumblr??}
And just because I love these bubble charts, here’s a sentiment chart of the primary keywords, grouped by context, from the investigation.
Do you have curiosity about a trend or words? Maybe I’ll pick yours to dig into next!
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