The Evenings, day 4: 25 December 1946/2025
Christmas day! Frits woke up a quarter to eight and 'his first thought was: "It is Christmas Day."' I must admit that my first thought was of coffee.
Today's chapter of The Evenings hosts almost 7.000 words (6993 to be precise), of which 1585 are different. That means the chapter has a type-token-ratio of 0.23, and the mean word length of 4 letters, both (dated) indicators of readability. As I worked on an online implementation of the so-called Hirsch-Popescu Point recently (see https://www.reuneker.nl/2025/12/hirsch-popescu-point-added-to-lexical-diversity-calculator), I thought it would be fun to see where that point, at which the frequency of a word matches its position in a sorted distribution table, lies in this chapter.
The Hirsch-Popescu Point (red) in chapter 4 of The Evenings.
Using the Lexical Diversity Calculator, it turns out the Hirsch-Popescu Point is 32: the word no occurs 32 times, and is the 32nd word in the word distribution. Going back to the text, we encounter it early on, right after Frits' initial thought of it being Christmas Day actually: 'On the window he saw no frost flowers.'
Have fun reading on this Christmas Day, and have a nice Christmas of course!