Power Laws, Words, and Iggy
http://www.forbes.com/sites/livbuli/2014/06/10/how-iggy-azalea-is-as-popular-online-as-the-word-apparent/
Power laws describe many phenomena in life. One example is word frequency, where in any corpus representative of a language as a whole, the most commonly used words account for a massive proportion of the overall word count. For example, in English, the word “the” is alone responsible for nearly 7% of all word occurrences, and “of” is is responsible for 3.5%. In linguistics and information retrieval literature, this phenomenon goes by the name of Zipf’s Law, which is really just a member of the Power Law family. Another distribution which follows Zipf’s Law is artist popularity. From the article, “About 80% of artists see less than one Facebook page like a day, and close to 90% of all the new page likes and followers in 2013 on Facebook and Twitter, were snagged by the top 1.1% of artists.”
Since these distributions both follow Zipf’s Law, what we can do is to use one to understand the other. In this case, because we are always immersed in language, we are much more familiar with the relative popularity differences in words than in the relative popularity differences in artists. As such, we can associate different words with different artists, and through our deep understanding of how popular a particular word is, we can also understand how popular its associated artist is as well. For example, words like “apparent”, “bigger”, “vision”, and “sick” are words which have the same analogous popularity as Iggy Azalea. The most ubiquitous artists like Eminem are associated with equally ubiquitous words, like “it”, “with”, “for”, and “and”.