Longshanks, winking, to his staff: Everything's gonna be all right!

So it's the start of week four (which I'll meekly argue is still the tail end of week three, depending on what time zone you're in and which Sabbath day you observe) and so, here I am. Pasting Bob Marley lyrics into Text Profiler. And there's a perfectly logical explanation. But before I get to it, check this out!

Now in one of my English courses I was taught that one needs to understand 95% of the words in a text in order to understand the text. In other words, learners of English as a foreign language can't really just "wing it" with weak vocabulary. That said, I can anecdotally attest to the fact that my understanding of Hebrew probably hovers around the 75% mark and, before the "say it again, slowly" request is honored, I get the gist of whatever's being said but miss any subtle nuance and all deeper meaning. And yet, check out Bob Marley! Nearly a quarter of his song is made up of official nonsense words and yet (going out on a limb here), EVERYONE understands No Woman, No Cry. I seh. Yeah!

I had intended to paste those timeless lyrics into Wordle or Tagxedo - cool sites which offer to draw the most used words of the song into a fun picture or word cloud for you - but got discouraged by the need to download a whole new browser to make it happen. I will imagine the word cloud would have looked like this:

'cause

friends

cry

woman

Everything's gonna be all right, yeah!

And I solemnly affirm, with my 54 anonymous and non-committed viewers as witness, that when the time comes to actually create a word cloud, I will, in fact, download the appropriate browser. 

I also had the great fortune of learning a new word, now that I am signed up to receive a word a day from WordSmith. I actually receive a word a day in Hebrew from Ulpan La-Inyan and it serves as a great source of self confidence as, 9 days out of 10, I already know the word. Imagine my shock when the very first word I saw on WordSmith was an actual new word I never knew. I've been speaking English for a long time so I assumed this word must have recently been added to the dictionary. Except that its first recorded usage was in 1620. Hmmmm.

Turns out my favorite scene from Braveheart was a defenestration and all this time I was just referring to it as 'that scene when the King threw Prince Longshanks' partner out the window'.  And would you look at Google - understanding that Guy Thrown Out Of Window = Defenestration. Impressive. 

Just for fun I searched "Everything's gonna be all right" in the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
7 hits and not one of them Bob Marley. Hmm....