A data science guy took a big database of heavy metal lyrics and compared it to another database that is supposed to represent standard English to see
which words are most metal and which the least:
The most metal word of all is burn, followed by cries, veins, eternity, and breathe. The least metal word is particularly, followed by indicated, secretary, committee, and university. What you can infer from this is that the metal English is spoken from a timeless, elemental, and darkly ethereal space, while standard English is unremarkably deskbound. Perhaps this is why we hunger for metal in the first place.
So heavy metal is the opposite of a university committee, particularly the secretary of the committee.
This study is clearly erroneous, in that it assumes a correlation between frequency of use and degree of Metalness.
ReplyDelete"Burn"? Eh, kind of metal. But the MOST metal of all words? Hardly. This is easily shown in that one can without much difficult think of synonyms for "burn" that are much more metal. For example, it's much more metal to "incinerate" your foes than to merely "burn" them.
"Eternity"? Not bad - a pretty metal concept, overall. But why settle for such a simple descriptor when you could instead ramp it up to eleven? Replace "for all eternity" with something like "until the dawn of unholy Ragnarok", or "until the final sun bleeds its last". Easily twice as brutal.
The greatest Words of Metal are like True Names - more than mere utterances, they are fragments of primordiality, seeping with ineffable violent potency that demands their careful and infrequent usage, lest they bring ruin upon us, or us upon them.