Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Drinking games are really merely a thinly veiled excuse for the immature to assign responsibility for their irresponsible behavior to an outside agent.

The trick to designing a good drinking game is picking just the right frequency of event. If it is a word trigger, the quickest would be to take a shot every time you hear the word the. But then shots might come too fast for even the most irresponsible drinker. And if beer were the drink of choice, you would need to slow it down quite a bit, because drinking and filling a whole glass takes longer and, arguably, a little more coordination.

Here is a good resource for picking the optimum word frequency:
BYU's Corpus of Contemporary American English

I love using BYU's website to discuss a drinking game!

This interface is a bit arcane, but it allows you to select for spoken American English, which has a different word frequency than written or combined frequencies. And for a drinking game, who's reading?

Then you want to pick an appropriate word in the frequency range. By the way, right falls at #58 most frequent word at 246380! That makes for quite a short drinking game! Like is #55 at 250355. These might be good for shots.

For beer, I go for something like something, #130 at 94907; news, #150 at 72119; life, #157 at 67988.

For a real intellectual's drinking game: government, #184 at 57534; percent, #228 at 45124;unidentified, #230 at 44783.

Of course, all of this goes out the window if you are talking about NPR! But the website does allow you to restrict the corpus to academic sub-sections of the corpus.

And don't get me started on the right frequencies for cannabis games.

Glenn said

I love using BYU's website to discuss a drinking game!

irony < iron + y < Fe +y < fey: (MW) 1  b  :  marked by a foreboding of death or calamity; 3  b  :  quaintly unconventional

This interface is a bit arcane

It's driving me through the whole bottle before I ever get to the game.

Thanks for the link.