Stereotype and caricature
I’ve posted a few times about the maps, word clouds, and so on that show the most distinctive words by gender or state — sometimes they are even mislabelled as the “most common” words. As I explained, these are often very rare words; it’s just that they are slightly less rare in one group than in the others.
An old post from the XKCD blog gives a really good example. Randall Munroe set up a survey to show people colours and ask for the colour name. He got five million responses, from over 200,000 sessions, and came up with nearly 1000 reasonably well-characterised colours. You can download the complete data, if you care.
The survey asked participants about their chromosomal sex, because two of the colour receptor genes are on the X-chromosome and this is linked to colour blindness (and possibly to tetrachromatic vision). It turned out that the basic colour names were very similar between male and female respondents, though women were slightly more likely to use modifiers (“lime green” vs “green”).
However, Munroe also looked at the responses that differed most in frequency between men and women. These were all uncommon responses, but all from multiple people, and after extensive spam filtering.
You can probably guess which group is which:
- Dusty Teal
- Blush Pink
- Dusty Lavender
- Butter Yellow
- Dusky Rose
- Penis
- Gay
- WTF
- Dunno
- Baige
(Presumably this is a gender effect, not an X-linked language defect.)
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »