A word cloud full of tourists

Happy New Year! Here, have some confetti, or at least a bunch of words. Pictured: the 125 most common words in my working draft (eleven chapters done, one to go). Click on photo for full size.

Made with Wordle.

New Year's resolution: cut back on the use of "seemed" (upper right).

Graph of the day: traveler vs tourist mentions in books, 1900-2008

Google estimates that it has scanned some 10 percent of all books, ever. And here comes Google Ngram Viewer to allow you to track mentions of words or phrases in their scanned database--in other words, to allow you to spend massive amounts of time being distracted (arugula vs. iceberg lettuce, Gore Vidal vs. Norman Mailer).

Traveler (blue) vs. tourist (red), 1900-2008 (click for larger version):

Note that "tourist" takes over for good in the mid-1950s--exactly when the budget tourism boom was beginning.