Blog / February 2012

This year, Twitter continues to take top honors. Facebook drops a few places compared to last year–has it become less-central to people’s lives? This year’s hot new site, Pinterest, almost makes the list, showing up at #118. (Incidentally, Pinterest has a number of Lent-related boards.)

Chocolate comes in at #2–however, if you add up all the mentions of chocolate in its various forms (“chocs,” “chocolate chips,” etc.), it totals over 14,000 mentions, enough to put it at #1.

This year’s biggest gainers are “breathing” and “makeup,” both of which jumped up more than 30 places in the list.

No celebrities make the top 100 this year. Boy band One Direction (aka #1D) is at #144, followed by Justin Bieber at #194 and Tim Tebow at #221. Last year’s curiosity, Charlie Sheen, only got two mentions; he dropped to #10,000 or so.

Overall, food was by far the most popular thing given up.

This list draws from about 300,000 tweets from February 19-25, 2012, and excludes retweets.

Rank	Word	Count	Change from last year’s rank
1.	Twitter	13,937	0
2.	Chocolate	13,001	+1
3.	Swearing	11,737	+1
4.	Alcohol	9,998	+1
5.	Soda	9,942	+2
6.	Facebook	9,025	-4
7.	Fast food	6,529	+3
8.	Sex	6,146	-2
9.	Sweets	4,973	+2
10.	Meat	4,444	-1
11.	Lent	4,171	-3
12.	School	3,976	+1
13.	Junk food	3,388	+6
14.	Chips	3,150	+4
15.	Coffee	2,263	0
16.	Candy	2,217	+6
17.	Bread	2,124	+3
18.	You	2,056	-2
19.	Smoking	2,002	+2
20.	Giving up things	2,001	-8
21.	Homework	1,908	+11
22.	Food	1,800	+5
23.	Social networking	1,754	-6
24.	Religion	1,701	-10
25.	Marijuana	1,594	+4
26.	Beer	1,359	+4
27.	Work	1,331	-3
28.	Stuff	1,302	-3
29.	McDonald's	1,249	+21
30.	Virginity	1,152	+7
31.	Cookies	1,137	+3
32.	Masturbation	1,134	+4
33.	Ice cream	1,113	+15
34.	Shopping	1,068	-6
35.	Fried food	993	-4
36.	Boys	956	+6
37.	Sobriety	910	+7
38.	Coke	899	+3
39.	Catholicism	881	-13
40.	Cheese	858	-7
41.	Nothing	831	+5
42.	Carbs	818	+16
43.	Red meat	758	-8
44.	Procrastination	738	+1
45.	Desserts	733	+26
46.	Pizza	714	+15
47.	Pancakes	650	-9
48.	Sugar	645	-5
49.	Rice	633	-10
50.	Breathing	631	+34
51.	Me	628	+12
52.	Texting	627	+3
53.	Starbucks	623	+1
54.	Fizzy drinks	595	+12
55.	French fries	593	+7
56.	Diet Coke	572	+21
57.	Porn	562	+10
58.	Tumblr	548	+12
59.	Wine	546	-7
60.	Makeup	539	+31
61.	Liquor	534	-5
62.	Booze	530	-22
63.	College	524	+18
64.	My phone	508	+30
65.	Life	486
66.	Caffeine	466	-17
67.	Laziness	453	+11
68.	Chipotle	452	+30
69.	Tea	445	+6
70.	Chicken	442	+2
71.	Cake	440	+3
72.	Sarcasm	429	+4
73.	New Year's resolutions	422	+15
74.	Takeout	417	+11
75.	Men	412	-10
76.	Pork	394	-3
77.	Christianity	388	-18
78.	Sleep	386	+1
79.	People	384	+8
80.	Caring	377
81.	Juice	357	+11
82.	Snacking	345
83.	Lying	333
84.	TV	332	-31
85.	Complaining	331	-2
86.	Church	328	-35
87.	Him	327	+2
88.	Sweet tea	326
89.	Lint	326	-21
90.	Vegetables	324
91.	Talking	323
92.	Bacon	321
93.	Being mean	320
94.	Pasta	316
95.	Eating out	316	+5
96.	Negativity	314	-39
97.	Eating	298
98.	Biting my nails	294
99.	Nutella	291
100.	Being nice	258

Categories

Rank	Category	Number of Tweets
1.	food	79,977
2.	habits	21,836
3.	technology	19,190
4.	smoking/drugs/alcohol	19,073
5.	health/hygiene	11,101
6.	sex	9,948
7.	irony	9,352
8.	school/work	8,567
9.	relationship	6,919
10.	religion	4,157
11.	generic	2,841
12.	shopping	1,491
13.	entertainment	1,344
14.	money	526
15.	sports	512
16.	celebrity	461
17.	possessions	376
18.	clothes	111
19.	politics	105

The image is a Wordle.

See the top 100 things people are giving up for Lent on Twitter, continually updated for the next few days.

Look for the usual post-mortem later this week.

Browse this grid interactively.

This visualization is arranged by book, showing cross-reference sources on the y-axis and targets on the x-axis. Within each square, the first verse in the book or section is at the top, and the last verse is at the bottom. Here’s what a detail of a square looks like:

Genesis 1 is at the top left; Genesis 50 is at the bottom left. Daniel 1 is at the top right; Daniel 12 is at the bottom right. The most-striking cross references between these two books, to me, involve Joseph’s interpretation of dreams in Genesis 40-41 and similar stories in Daniel.

Also see a previous cross reference visualization.