Sooooooo...... I found this one fanfiction on Fanfiction.net ages ago, and realized that they tended to use epithets a lot, like a LOT.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13782895/1/The-Storm
Now you may be asking me, "But Strange Writer Person Whom I Have Never Spoken To In My Life, what the flying duck is an epithet?"
And my answer to that, my darling readers, is:
Ask Google.
Just kidding, here's what Merriam-Webster has to say on this:
epithet:
a: a characterizing word or phrase accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a person or thing
b : a disparaging or abusive word or phrase
c : the part of a taxonomic name identifying a subordinate unit within a genus
Now, I'm not accusing the writer of racism, and they don't seem to be the type to drop biology terms on the regular, so by process of elimination, that leaves the first definition to be the one to worry your pretty heads about.
Since we're all caught up on the lingo, let's continue. With their usage of epithets being so high, I decided to crunch the numbers. Why? I have a sad, uneventful life and this was the only method of entertaining myself I could think of. Anyways, let's play everyone's favorite game,
EPITHETS vs. NOUNS
Now to get these numbers, all I had to do was hit cntrl+f on my keyboard and I got this convenient little word counter. I typed the epithet they most consistently used for their OC into the search bar before scanning the fic to see if there were any typos that I needed to add, and then repeating the process with their OC's name, but scanned for dialogue to cut out where other characters refer to her through her name. I put those numbers into an online calculator and here are the results:
Epithets were used 381 times, and the character was called by her name 114 times. On average, epithets were used 3.34 times more than the character's name was at an average rate of 23.8125 epithets per chapter compared to 7.125 times the character was mentioned by name.
Epithets made up 0.835% of all the words in the story while the main character's name made up 0.299% of the words in the story.
A/N: This is not meant to snark on or make fun of the author. I think what they've created is astounding, and their OC has functioning brain cells, which is one step above mine, so I have no right to make fun of them. Anyways, thank you for making it through this much of my stupidity. If you have anything else you want to see, drop it down below in the comments. Bye!
-TTWT
YOU ARE READING
The Chaos Zone of Octonauts (and my OC)
FanfictionA buncha random Octonauts drawings and stuff I do because I have zero brain cells. Please gimme requests for what you'd like to see and I'll (try to) deliver! Ft. The reason I lost all of my brain cells, My OC!
