Friday Fun: You Are What You Say

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Outside of high school English classes, most people don't give much thought to pronouns, prepositions, articles, auxiliary verbs, and other "function words" (e.g., I, to, of, am, the). They seem to be no more than fillers for the more important content words–the who, what, where, and why of language. But it turns out that these invisible words have psychological significance. In his new book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, psychologist James Pennebaker describes findings from his research on the relationship between natural language use, personality, and social life. Much of this research is conducted using a computerized linguistic analysis program that calculates the percentage of words in a given text that fall into a range of grammatical, emotional, and topical categories.

On the book's website, Pennebaker features six simple linguistic exercises that have the potential to reveal aspects of your personality and your compatibility with others. I tried out a few of them...
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