The word “law” is the 321st most frequently used word in the English language, which ain’t bad. I know this via Wordcount [1], a datamining tool by the inventive Jonathan Harris [2], creator of the interesting news site 10×10 [3] and other fascinating displays of our collective behaviour.
Mining data from the British National Corpus [4], Wordcount includes all the words that occur at least twice there, some 86,000 of them. It then portrays them according to frequency, using size as a visual indicator. There may not be much intellectual meat here, but it is fun to roam around and to see, among other things, what words live cheek by jowl. For example, and as you see in the graphic above, law lives sandwiched between “labour” to the left and “research” to the right, which latter juxtaposition suggests that Slaw is on to something.
By the way, Wordcount tells us that “slaw” does not appear in the database, and nor does it appear in the BNC. I can’t decide if that’s good or bad.