Economist, Sept 22, 2018 (I)

choi

Johnson | Lodestars and Fingerprints; The subtle science of attributing anonymous prose.

Quote:

British anthropologist "Kate Fox's pop-anthropology book 'Watching the English' uses the word 'liminal' 24 times in about 500 pages. (She deploys it to describe borderline spaces such as the pub, which exists between work and home.)"Liminal' accounts for just 0.00009% of all the words in English books published, as 'Watching the English' was, in 2014.

"an anonymous op-ed by 'a senior official in Trump administration' in the New York Times * * * The anonymous writer praised the late senator John McCain as "a lodestar  for restoring honour to public life.' Armchair detectives pounced. 'Lodestar' is only an eighth as common as [ie, even less common than] 'liminal.' Quick searches found that Mike Pence, the vice president, has used the word in a number of speeches * * * He denied it, of course But there are better reasons to think this lodestar -- originally, a guiding star -- is leading in the wrong direction. Experts in forensic linguistics don't rely on words like 'lodestar' to determine authorship: rare events are bad at generating predictions.

"Much more helpful are small words that appear more frequently * * * Writings are not exactly like fingerprints; people produce many more than ten in a lifetime, and vary their style for any number of reasons. * * *It is rumoured that when Trump staffers speak off the record to the press, they insert colleagues' signature phrases to throw sleuths off the trail.) But the two [writings and fingerprints] are similar in that trivial features, in aggregate, provide a clue to the ownership.

"Take the Federalist Papers. * * * Of 85 essays, 12 were later claimed by both [Alexander] Hamilton and [James] Madison. Historians [could not solve it.] Then in the 1960s two statisticians noticed that Hamilton, in his known writings, used 'while,' never 'whilst.' Madison was a 'whilst' man. Madison wrote 'on," rarely 'upon;' Hamilton used both. With these and a few common words * * * all [disputed papers] turned out to be Madison's. What had eluded historians was proved by the mathematicians.

"Today, it is known that a piece of writing can supply hints of the probable sex of the author, along with their [this column once argued use of 'their' instead of 'his or her'] level of education, regional background and other qualities [based on word preferences]. * * * [American and a recent Harvard graduate,] Ben Blatt recent book  'Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve' is a delightful introduction to this science of style.

Note:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) Regarding "in the 1960s two statisticians" in quotation 4.

Frederick Mosteller and David L Wallace, Inference in an Authorship Problem. Journal of the American Statistical Association. 58: 275–309 (1963).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2283270
(c) lodestar (n; Did You Know)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lodestar
(d)
(i) Vladimir Nabokov (1899 (St Petersburg, Russia) - 1977 (Switzerland); a Russian-American; published Lolita in 1955 in English)
(ii) Mauve is a color of light purple, as shown in upper right corner of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauve
(A) mauve (n)
https://www.etymonline.com/word/mauve

Not to confuse mallow with (bone) marrow.
(B) mallow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallow
(may refer to "Malvaceae, family of plants")