by Zoë Pollock
After reviewing James Pennebaker’s new book on language, Ben Zimmer revisits Pennebaker's scholarship on the Beatles:
The songs on which [John Lennon and Paul McCartney] collaborated closely produced linguistic patterns strikingly different from those of either songwriter individually. The 15 songs that were true John-Paul partnerships, Mr. Pennebaker says, were “much more positive” in emotional tone and used “more I-words, fewer we-words and much shorter words than either artist normally used on his own.” Mr. Pennebaker discerns that same synergy at work in a very different collection of texts: The Federalist Papers, three of which were written jointly by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.
For more, Pennebaker co-wrote an article in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, “Things We Said Today: A Linguistic Analysis of the Beatles,” (pdf) in 2008.
The Dish 