You don't have to be five year-old YouTube star Noah Ritter, a.k.a. "the apparently kid," to have your identity linked to a specific word.
Putting together vocabulary lists several years ago from authors John Green, Jonathan Safran Foer, M.T. Anderson, and Junot Diaz, we noticed that each list was laced with words that seemed to match the author-in-question's style. We had to wonder:
Did the particular words [each author was using]…imprint some mark of authorial ownership? Could you use a literature-based Vocabulary List as a fingerprint of sorts, determining an author’s identity after reading through only their list of words? And does that concept of a unique vocabulary apply to everyone, not just authors?
Recently, Slate’s Good Word columnist Matthew J.X. Malady answered our question in the affirmative:
I had just started a new job. One day, a few weeks in, I heard three different colleagues with whom I interact often use the word iteration independent of one another. When the third of these, a woman I knew prior to taking the job, said it, I stopped her mid-sentence. “Wait, did you just say iteration? Why is everyone saying that word here?” Her response hit me like an unabridged thesaurus to the dome. “You should be psyched,” she shot back. “That’s one of your words.”
After a fit of denial, and some back-and-forth, I went home after work and asked my wife if there were any weird, fingerprint-type words I used often.
“You mean like iteration?” she said, without the slightest pause. Then the floodgates opened. “You also say tangential all the time. Oh, antiquated, too! And you’re always talking about the extent to which someone did this or that.”
She kept going. Turns out I have an affinity for anachronism and maintain a close connection with cognizant.
So how do you figure out what words are part of your vocabulary fingerprint? When it comes to your written language at least, that's easy. Cut and paste a piece of writing into our Vocabulary List builder using the "from text" option, and the tool will count up the number of times you use the words it pulls out for you. (In a lesson on writing, editing, and word choice, Georgia Scurletis, director of curriculum at Vocabulary.com, used this tool to determine Stephenie Meyer's vocabulary fingerprint, noting that in Twilight alone she uses the word stare 181 times.)
If you're New York City Mayor, members of the press are happy to keep track of the words you use most often, as when the The Wall Street Journal pointed out how often New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio uses historic and transcendent, or The New York Times made a similar observation about former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's use of unconscionable.
When a court awarded $308,000 in 2003 to a Bronx woman who slipped on a snowy sidewalk, the decision was “unconscionable.” When the city’s transit workers went on strike in 2005, their walkout was “unconscionable.” And when Mayor Bloomberg contemplated the possibility earlier this month that the State Assembly might not bring his congestion pricing plan to a vote, the mere thought of such a thing was — you guessed it — “unconscionable.”
It is possible for de Blasio and Bloomberg to change. Just look at Maladay, who, in his Slate piece, chronicles stepping away from iteration, now that he saw it as a trend. Even five year old Ritter seems uncomfortable being linked forever to a single word. In a recent appearance on the Ellen Degeneres Show, he didn't use apparently at all, announcing that he's switching his signature to seriously.