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Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

The Hedonometer and Your Feelings. What Does 'Schnozz' Mean?

Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Society & Culture, Education

4.52.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2021

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Researchers and companies are harnessing computers to identify the emotions behind our written words. While sentiment analysis is far from perfect, it manages to distill meaning from huge amounts of data — and could one day even monitor mental health. In the second segment of this episode, we answer a listener question about the word "schnozz": is it really from 1980s children's television? Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates. Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Peeve Wars card game. Grammar Girl books. HOST: Mignon Fogarty VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475) Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network. Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk. Links: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/ https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl http://twitter.com/grammargirl http://facebook.com/grammargirl http://pinterest.com/realgrammargirl http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Grandma Girl here. I'm in Yonfogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

0:09.6

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today we'll

0:15.5

talk about researchers who are analyzing people's writing to figure out how they feel,

0:20.2

and then we'll talk about the word schnauz.

0:26.4

This next segment is by Dana McKenzie, an originally appeared in Noble magazine.

0:32.4

Did 2020 seem like the worst year ever to you? Well, such a description may seem hopelessly

0:39.0

subjective. According to one measure, it's true. That yardstick is the hedonometer, a

0:45.3

computerized way of assessing both our happiness and our despair. It runs day in day out on

0:51.4

computers at the University of Vermont, where it scrapes some 50 million tweets per day off

0:56.8

Twitter and then gives a quick and dirty read of the public's mood. According to the

1:01.7

hedonometer, 2020 was by far the most horrible year since it began keeping track in 2008.

1:08.7

It's ticked back up again in 2021. We're a little happier, at least collectively on Twitter,

1:14.0

than we were in 2020. But this year is no basket of puppies and rainbows either. The

1:19.4

hedonometer is a relatively recent incarnation of a task computer scientists have been working

1:24.7

on for more than 50 years, using computers to assess words emotional tone. To build the

1:31.6

hedonometer, UVM computer scientist Chris Danesforth had to teach a machine to understand

1:37.7

the emotions behind those tweets. No human could possibly read them all. This process

1:44.4

called sentiment analysis has made major advances in recent years and is finding more and

1:49.9

more uses. In addition to taking Twitter users emotional temperature, researchers are employing

1:56.2

sentiment analysis to gauge people's perceptions of climate change and to test conventional

2:01.4

wisdom such as in music, whether a minor chord is sadder than a major chord and by how

2:08.1

much. Businesses who covet information about customers' feelings are harnessing sentiment

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