Obsessed with Being

Some press sources say "the world", some say "the nation" (meaning the UK). But they're all making hay of the fact that the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) shows "time" to be the most frequent noun. This shows we're obsessed with time

Well, of cour-- say what?

Not exactly.

As Benjamin Zimmer points out over on Language Log, "time" is the 55th most frequent word overall. The top spots are, of course, claimed by function words such as "the, a, to, of, in" ... the building blocks of English syntax. Let's acknowledge that's not very meaningful and move on to the content words.

A bunch of verbs are more frequent than any noun. Apparently, what we English speakers are really obsessed with is "being, having, doing, saying, getting, going, and making."

Okay - now that actually sounds sort of reasonable.

Zimmer's article goes on to point out that this is not new - the huge Brown corpus of the 1960s showed "time" as top noun, too.

(If you're interested in such things, the top twenty nouns are time, person, year, way, day, thing, man, world, life, hand, part, child, eye, woman, place, work, week, case, point, and government. Make of that list what you will.)

You can read the press release in pdf format here.