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Comment by ryangittins

3 years ago

As I recall, one of the clinchers was his use of the phrase, "you can’t eat your cake and have it too" as opposed to the now-predominant variant "you can’t have your cake and eat it too."

I often wonder if stylometry can be used to positively identify a person based not on general word frequency, but by a single phrase or two which are rare in general but commonly used by the individual. In theory this could be relatively easy to find given a large corpus. You'd pick out the top few n-grams for short phrases by an individual and identify the ones which are most overly-represented compared to the rest of the population.