It’s been a little while since I’ve written up any of my projects on the blog and after listening to the Seinfeld Recap Podcast this week, I thought I was overdue for a write up.
If you are unfamiliar with the podcast (then honestly, I don’t know what you are doing here), each week, the hosts, Rob Cesternino and Akiva Wienerkur, recap one episode of Seinfeld.
A listener recently commented that Akiva says “I mean” a lot during the podcasts. Now, everyone relies on filler words and phrases while speaking, in a medium like a podcast, it’s fully on display for everyone to pick up on. These verbal tics are very hard to eliminate without a lot of work and concentration.
I certainly hate listening to myself from any recording because all I hear is the “umms” and “ahhs” and repetitive things I say.
It’s terrible.
Now the big question I want to tackle in today’s is:
Does Akiva indeed say “I mean” a lot and how does that compare to other 2-tuple word combinations used by the podcast hosts?
The Data and Analysis
As of this writing, the recap podcast is up to episode 145. For my analysis, I am using the first 88 episodes, which I had previously converted from audio to text.
To analyze the various 2-tuple phrases and how common they occur, I wrote an algorithm to generate all combinations of two words that either Akiva or Rob have used. For example, in a sentence like “Recently that I missed like an hour of work for kid number three.”, that results in the following combinations: recently that, that I, I missed, missed like, like an, an hour, hour of, of work, work for, for kid, kid number, number three.
Using these 2-tuples, I then calculated how many times each of them have occurred across the 88 episode recaps.
Unfortunately, I cannot separate who said what, so the combinations and totals are for the combination of both Rob and Akiva.
Results
My program found 265,319 2-tuples, with “I mean”, being the 9th most common, happening an average of 51 times per episode.
“I think”, is the third most common. The word “think” came up in my original analysis as one of the most common words used on the podcast.
However, the big winner is “you know”, occurring a staggering 176 times per episode!
But it turns out, this is quite common amongst all English speakers. I actually found a number of discussion threads (reddit, Phish, and Grammarphobia) asking the question, “Why do people say ‘I mean’ so much?”.
“I mean” and “you know” are two of the most common verbal tics, tracing their origins in English back to the 19th century.
So Rob and Akiva have tons of company. I mean, you know, I’m definitely in this club :-).
Below is a graph of the 30 most common 2 word phrases used in the podcast. The vertical bars correspond to the average number of times that combination is used per episode.
Here’s the original tag cloud I generated for the most popular single words used during the podcast.
Final Thoughts
So, it turns out Akiva and/or Rob do say “I mean” a lot, but only about a third as often as “you know”.
It also turns out that they are not alone and if you are reading this, you likely use these phrases a lot when speaking without you realizing it.
If you enjoyed this, check out my other Seinfeld-related posts:
Great Read – you rock!