Statistically improbable words 1

According to the doorman, the Roman panaroma was being slowly worn away by the continuous gaze of tourists, and if no action were taken, it would soon be entirely used up. ... In a second footnote he emphasized, as proof of his thesis, how the view visibly worsened in the spring and summer, coinciding with the greater crowds of tourists, while in the winter, when tourists were scant, one noticed no change for the worse; on the contrary, it seemed the panorama slowly regained its traditional limpidity.

-- Luigi Malerba, "Consuming the View" (tr. Lesley Riva from the Italian)

Comments

[Ellie K]

Maybe this would've benefited from a better translation (no offense explicitly intended to tr. by Lesley Riva)?

Actually, it was your tag that truly caught my eye: StatimproWords. I've often seen and been curious about the Statistically Improbable designation on Amazon. Now I idly wonder about the analytics behind it, or if either the methodology, or even the output alone could be used to draw amusing inferences...

I guess Statistically Improbable seems like perfect fodder for the Junk Charts blog. On a purely intuitive level.
;@)

[Kaiser]

Ellie: Glad to see a comment on this item.

I should explain what I mean by "statistically improbable". In these entries, I cite interesting passages in that the authors improbably -- perhaps unconsciously -- touch upon statistical materials. I was thinking that I should have called these "statistically aware sentences".

For instance, this Malerba passage touches upon coincidence and causality.

Here's the link to Amazon's description of their "statistically improbable phrases". In theory, these are phrases that appear more frequently in the searched book relative to other books. This is an idea that looks nicer on paper than in practice. Many of the SIPs don't appear in other books, and if they do, often don't carry the same meaning.