Friday, January 3, 2025

That's us, blue butterfly!

As readers may remember for my May 16 post "'Come buy, come buy,' was still their cry," I have a spreadsheet that shows how many times each English word occurs in my students' textbooks, and on which pages. In that post, sorting the words on a particular page by how many times they had previously occurred in the book led to the serendipitous appearance of "come buy" (call the goblins hobbling down the glen) and the suggestion of a much longer mostly-coherent utterence.

I was recently using the equivalent spreadsheet for a different book. In this sheet, it color-codes each row according to frequency, so that words (or, rather, word-sense mappings) that appear more than 25 but fewer than 50 times in the book have an amber background. (I coded all this months ago, before "amber" had become synchronistically relevant). On Wednesday, having sorted all the words in the book by total occurrences, I noticed this:


Anything with a blue butterfly catches my eye these days, but the sync is more specific than that. In my December 7 post "The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies," I posted this image:


This features two blue morpho butterflies and the name Amber on a blue background. The spreadsheet has "blue butterfly," with the word blue on an amber background.

2 comments:

WanderingGondola said...

Who's meant by "us", though?

I read this during a brief pause from searching 4plebs (via VPN, btw). Shortly after returning to the search, I hit on a thread with "goblins" in the title: archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/492953616

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

What do you mean “we,” kemosabe?

I’m not sure. Unlike last time, the surrounding words don’t shed much light, though I suppose “enjoy fruit” could be a link back to the Christina Rossetti poem.

Perhaps the line is spoken by one butterfly to another as they’re looking through old caterpillar photos.