(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
2. to 3417 124.29 7. your 145 83.01
3. is 1784 114.66 8. say 119 81.08
4. man 555 107.23 9. be 923 75.04
5. but 882 94.27 10. what 394 70.64
Table 5: Top ten keywords - Steele
As with Addison, one major group of keywords consists of proper names. Pharamond,
Eucrate, Alexandrinus and Rhynsault are characters in stories that Steele weaves into
his essays. With regard to the first two of these characters, in number 76 of The
Spectator Steele presents readers with the purported memoirs of a Frenchman, Prince
Pharamond, and relates the story of his friendship with a commoner, Eucrate. Steele’s
relation of this tale continues in number 84, and Pharamond is mentioned again in
numbers 92, 97 and 99. On the other hand, (Timothy) Buck and (James) Miller were
real people, protagonists in a sword fight that Steele watched at Hockley in the Hole and
later reported on. These ‘keynames’ are therefore of much lesser renown than the
literary figures and religious characters who belong to Addison’s list. Instead, they
reflect the anecdotal nature of Steele’s contributions to The Spectator, compared to
Addison’s, which contain fairly lengthy discussions of Milton and epic poetry.
The largest grouping of semantically-similar words is the one that I have labeled ‘Life
in Society’, a catch-all term which includes a word referring to one’s being in society
(company), words referring to a person’s doing something for others (favour, service),
two words that indicate power or the effect of power on others (power, glory), two that
connect with notions of social worth (merit, worthy), and words for a trait or a behavior
characterized by good actions towards another person (kindness, gallantry). Finally,
there is a group of terms that refer to social ranks, whether the actual ranks themselves
(gentleman, prince, officer) or one word that has changed in meaning since the early
eighteenth century, but at that time meant ‘social rank’ (condition).
The large number of members in this ‘social’ group indicates Steele’s concern with the
social world and people’s place in it. This is not to say that Addison did not also
regularly deal with such topics and, with the exception of negligent, used all of the same
words at least once. But it is perhaps because Addison discussed a much wider range of
topics in his essays that the limited range of Steele’s contributions is proportionately
reflected in the highlighting of this semantic group on his keyword list.
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