What’s your favourite word?

In David Lodge’s effervescent farce Small World, the unspeakable Robin Dempsey gives northern author Ronald Frobisher a computerised analysis of his style.

The angry young novelist’s favourite adjectives, it turns out, are ‘grease’, ‘grime’ and ‘grey’; direct speech for male characters is signalled by a blunt ‘he said’, while women gasp, sigh, whisper urgently, or cry passionately; his female leads have biblical names beginning with the letter ‘R’; and so on. Crippled by this awareness of his own style, Frobisher endures six miserable years of writer’s block.

Small World was written in 1984. I dread to think what would happen to the poor bloke if he had the tools currently available.

Check out, for example, the terrifying Analyze Words, which takes your Twitter feed and tells you how cheery you are.

Might as well just change my handle to @miserableoldman.

There are the ever-present Wordles, which everyone seems to think are just the cutest thing. Except that if you actually wrote most of the copy for the website…

…you find yourself sitting there going ‘Underway? But that’s a horrible word. I can’t possibly be using it that much.” Then you look and you realise that it’s all over the internet, everywhere you’ve ever typed into a CMS.