Trump uses Twitter as a proxy for the blunt manner of speaking we became so familiar with on the campaign trail. He celebrates his Twitter account as offering a the general public a direct line to whatever he’s thinking at any given moment. And on Wednesday morning, it seems, he was thinking about excoriation.

AD

AD

Since Merriam-Webster’s exploration on Twitter of Trump’s use of language is mostly limited to trolling, we’ll dispatch with the definition ourselves. To “excoriate” is to “censure scathingly,” per the dictionary — to dress down or to robustly criticize. Whether Democrats have “excoriated” Page, a tangential figure in Trump’s circle with clear links to Russia, is beside the point.

We were interested in how often Trump used uncommon words such as “excoriate.” So we made a tool that ranked the words used in all of Trump’s tweets since 2009 (using data from the endlessly useful Trump Twitter Archive) by how frequently they appeared in public-domain books catalogued by Project Gutenberg. (The data on frequency came from Wiktionary.)

So here, for example, is what Trump’s tweets over the past two years have looked like, with darker red boxes indicating less-frequent word choices. “Excoriate” is near the bottom of the 2017 list (as you might expect, since they’re in chronological order).

2016

2017

As it turns out, “excoriate” is not the most uncommon word that Trump has used this year. From 2009 to 2017, the most-uncommon words used by Trump were, in order: videos, Gaga, cyber, autism, rework, autism, gimmick, sidekick and Chevy.

AD

AD

Project Gutenberg includes a lot of books that may not be up to speed on the modern uses of “Chevy” and “Gaga” (as in “Lady”). A century ago, those words were less common than they are today, certainly. (You probably noticed this with other “uncommon” words in the charts above.) Perhaps the most interesting inclusion there is “autism,” which Trump has tweeted about 41 times — usually through the lens of the completely debunked assertion that autism is somehow linked to vaccines.

So let’s look at this another way.

The graph above shows how often each percentile of frequency appeared as a percentage of all of the words Trump used. Translated from nerd, what this graph shows is how common the words were that Trump used in his tweets. More than half were in the 99th percentile of frequency — meaning that the words he uses most are commonly used words.

AD

AD

Which — makes sense. “Excoriate,” in the 16th percentile, is uncommon generally and uncommon in Trump’s usage. The only other time he’s used a variant of it was in June of last year.