GraphJam Side A · Music & pop culture in charts
The Plate Archive28 charts

Words, Grammar and Things People Say, in Charts

Charts whose dataset is a sentence somebody actually said.

Twenty-eight charts whose subject is language. Some plot what people say, some plot what people write badly, and the best of them plot the distance between a phrase’s meaning and its function, which is a real linguistic observation, arrived at by readers who were not trying to make one.

The hedge, measured

Definition of “no offense” is the collection’s sharpest chart and is linked from two sites. What it plots is a pragmatic marker: a phrase that does not soften an insult but announces one. That is a finding about discourse, drawn as a pie by somebody who had simply noticed.

When Someone Says, “It isn’t a popularity contest.” works the same way. So does What Part Of “I’m Not Interested” Do Telemarketers Not Understand?", which turns a rhetorical question into a comprehension test. Each one takes a fixed formula and asks what it predicts, and in every case the answer is the opposite of the literal content.

Reflex speech

A second group counts words produced without deliberation. What You Yell When You Stub Your Toe is the purest example, an involuntary utterance, categorised. Things Said Just Prior to an Accident plots the same phenomenon in the seconds before rather than after. Things I May Say To Myself moves it inside the head.

Responses I get at McDonalds When I ask customers if they want ‘crispy’ or ‘grilled’ chicken and Questions I’m forced to answer as a photo lab employee are both drawn from behind a counter, and both hold their links. They are service-work charts as much as language charts: a record of the same sentence heard several hundred times.

Spelling, and the failure to notice

Four entries here are about written error. CHANCES I’LL CATCH MY TYPOS plots detection probability against, essentially, how much you care. On the subject of Grammatical Errors… is linked from two sites, and manages to be about the tone of correction rather than the correction itself. Things You Do When You Notice A Typo is a response table. Use a dictionary. Please. is an instruction rather than a chart, which the chart format makes funnier.

People that use units correctly is the one entry here that a physicist would enjoy, and it is genuinely about precision rather than about spelling.

Speech attributed elsewhere

The collection’s last mode gives the words to somebody or something else. Likelihood of things cats would say if they could talk is a speculative frequency table. Derogatory Terms used by Mr. T is a real lexicon of a real catalogue. Things Twittered is linked from two sites, and reads now as a document about a platform whose conventions were still forming in May 2009.

Hello, Is The Lady Of The House In? and Dear nigeria im not interested ever both plot unsolicited speech from the receiving end, and the second, the final entry in this collection, from September 2010, with the image lost, is a chart addressed to a correspondent who was never going to read it.

Charts here
28
Images recovered
13
Published as plates
1
Referring domains
34
First posted
Apr 2008
Last posted
Sep 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    Use a dictionary. Please.

  2. A2

    Things I May Say To Myself

    · image not recovered

  3. A3

    Things a Cop Might Say to You

    · Drawn by Evan J

  4. A4

    Derogatory Terms used by Mr. T

    · Drawn by Tyler R · image not recovered

  5. A5

    People that use units correctly

    · Drawn by Jacob

  6. A6

    The Alphabet

    · Drawn by Joe

  7. A7

    Equation

    · Drawn by jessi_stern · image not recovered

  8. A8

    What Part Of “I’m Not Interested” Do Telemarketers Not Understand?”

    · Drawn by kd7cb

  9. A9

    Things discussed at meetings

    · Drawn by gasp262 · image not recovered

  10. A10

    Things Twittered

    · Drawn by ajv915 · 2 domains still link here

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    Things Said Just Prior to an Accident

    · Drawn by ten-eight-cious

  13. B2

    On the subject of Grammatical Errors…

    · Drawn by bizniz · 2 domains still link here

  14. B3

    Questions I’m forced to answer as a photo lab employee

    · Drawn by LinkMoo · image not recovered

  15. B4

    Responses I get at McDonalds When I ask customers if they want ‘crispy’ or ‘grilled’ chicken

    · Drawn by DogDayAfternoon · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  16. B5

    CHANCES I’LL CATCH MY TYPOS

    · Drawn by dogheadbuttchow

  17. B6

    What I Think When I See Someone Wearing a Red-and-White Striped Shirt

    · image not recovered

  18. B7

    When Someone Says, “It isn’t a popularity contest.”

    · Drawn by stephielynn27 · image not recovered

  19. B8

    Likelihood of things cats would say if they could talk

    · Drawn by aknerd

  20. B9

    Definition of “no offense”

    · Drawn by Aqp · 2 domains still link here

  21. B10

    Things People Say When I Write With My Left Hand

    · Drawn by 2ndchair · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  22. Side C
  23. C1

    What You Yell When You Stub Your Toe

    · Drawn by ThePerceptiveObserver

  24. C2

    Things People Say When a Movie Finishes in the Theaters

    · Drawn by buhbek · image not recovered

  25. C3

    Talking speed in parts of medicine commercials

    · image not recovered

  26. C4

    When someone asks “Guess What?”

    · image not recovered

  27. C5

    Things You Do When You Notice A Typo

    · image not recovered

  28. C6

    Amount of acting classes needed for

    · image not recovered

  29. C7

    Hello, Is The Lady Of The House In?

    · image not recovered

  30. C8

    Dear nigeria im not interested ever

    · image not recovered

Queries answered

What is in this collection?

Twenty-eight charts about language: things people say, things people misspell, and the gap between what a phrase means and what it is used for. They run from April 2008 to September 2010.

What is the 'no offense' chart?

Definition of “no offense”, from October 2009. It plots what the phrase actually predicts about the sentence that follows it, and it is linked from two sites — including from people writing about hedged speech rather than about humour.

Why are grammar and speech in the same collection?

Because both are charts about language behaviour rather than about language rules. A chart of the typos you fail to catch and a chart of what you shout when you hurt yourself are the same kind of observation: a habit of speech, counted.

Is there a chart of the alphabet?

Yes, from November 2008, and it is a Venn diagram rather than a plot: one circle of vowels, one of consonants, and y sitting in the overlap. Two addresses point at it, one with a trailing slash and one without, both now resolving to the same entry.

Why do some entries have no image?

Every original chart image was hosted on a service that no longer serves them, so a surviving copy had to be found for each one. Where none survived, the entry keeps its title, date and address rather than a substitute image.