“Studiously” – 369,000 google hits
“Studiously ignored” – 85,500 google hits
“Studiously ignores” – 59,700 google hits
Here at TrueNorth we like words almost as much as programming, well I do anyway. I have been looking for a good example of this phenomenon for a while, where a regular english word becomes so attached to its partner that it may as well not exist on its own.
I think ‘bated’ is one of the best:
“bated” – 1,230,000
“bated breath” – 401,000
That gives a word redundancy factor (yes I am making this up) of 0.33.
I opened this up on FB recently and got some very nice examples:
“Earth shattering” – 0.30
“Casting aspersions” – 0.40
“Backhanded compliment” – 0.40 (backhanded criticism is a mere 6,000 hits)
“Foregone conclusion” – 0.49
“Extenuating circumstances” – 0.11
The current record holder seems a bit cheaty, as it is not an idiom but a snippet of a larger cliche:
“Let bygones” – an incredible wrf of 0.65
A few that work because they use proper nouns:
“Midas touch” – 0.22
“Poseidon Adventure” – 0.57
And one that works because this usage swamps the common usages of the individual words:
“Star Trek” – 0.46
Some have gone beyond the 1.0 extinction limit and the words have simply merged:
“Ruth-less”
“Over-whelm”
So, the ‘Official’ rules of the game are:
- Pick a two word pairing
- Google one of the words in quotes and record the number of hits
- Google the pairing in quotes and record the number of hits
- Divide 3) by 2) to give the wrf
- Spellings are exact but must all be regular english words
- No proper nouns
Can you beat ‘let bygones’?