Am I getting a little too obsessed with the lyrics of Enrique Santos Discépolo, author of CAMBALACHE, INFAMIA, CONDENA, ESTA NOCHE ME EMBORRACHO, and thirty-four others? Yes! There, I've admitted it. And here's one result:
From here, deep down in the pit of my obsession, I've made a Discépolo "word-cloud." [Click on the image above to enlarge.] For those who don't know, a word cloud is a graphical representation of the most frequently used words in a text. The words appear larger or smaller depending on how frequently they appear. The more frequent, the bigger a word appears.
The text for this word-cloud is all forty lyrics that Discepolín wrote. It shows the top one hundred words that appear in Discépolo's oevre, plus his name. (For your reference, Discépolo's name appeared forty times, once for each song. So any word that's bigger than his name appeared more than forty times, and v.v.) Okay, now you see how profound is my obsession....
I was going to write a commentary on my Discépolo word-cloud, and I may still do that. But I think the whole point of a word-cloud is that it speaks for itself in graphic language. So, for the time being, I'm sharing it with you, dear reader, as is. Have a look, see what you make of it, and let's discuss.
One minor note: When you make a word-cloud (I did mine in Wordle) you have the option of filtering out frequently used words (like el, la, con, su, tu, etc.) in whatever language you are working with. I've done that here. Without that option, the most frequently used word in all of Discépolo's lyrics is "que" (that), which appears 372 times, far more than runners-up de (281), y (221), or la (207). I find that interesting, because it calls attention to ESD's habit of using the conjunction que as a connecting link among a series of parallel, dependent clauses. It's one of the things that gives his lyrics their uniquely incantatory, rant-like quality. Here's an example, from ESTA NOCHE ME EMBORRACHO [my translation]:
And to think that ten years ago, I was crazy about her! That I stooped to betrayal for her beauty!...That this person who is now a total wreck was the sweet infatuation/indiscretion where I lost my dignity; that, crazy for her beauty, I stole food from my own mother, I became heartless, a freeloader; that I lost all my friends; that I lived by cheating others; that she had me on my knees; when she left me.... (It goes on like that, que...; que...; que....)
I'm sure I'll want to write more about this another time. Meanwhile, I'd love to hear your comments, either here or on Facebook.
Ars long, vita brevis, tango siempre!
Another layout of the same cloud, with a few mods [click to enlarge]:
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