It’s no secret that I love the television show Friends. In a recent post, I even watched all 230+ episodes in order to figure out which character worked the most.

You might call that weird or pathetic, but I call it dedication.

Anyway, some of my favorite scenes in the show involve character Phoebe Buffay playing the guitar and singing from her collection of songs, most of which manage to be both brutally honest AND somewhat whimsical at the same time.

Some of her songs describe the ups and downs of love…

Others attempt to make sense of death and suicide…

A few serve as outlets of Phoebe’s fury toward specific people…

And many are simply…unique

With her songs covering such a wide variety of topics, I decided it’d be interesting – no, make that important – to figure out what word or idea is expressed the most often.

To answer this question, I employed some highly technical and skilled research methods:

• Step 1: Found a site that lists the lyrics to all her songs

• Step 2: Copied and pasted everything into a word cloud generator.

And here’s the result:

…Not exactly what I was expecting haha. But now that I think about it, a majority of Phoebe’s songs ARE accessorized with “la.” My guess is she ran out of clever rhyming lyrics to use, but the syllable does seem pretty versatile – it can be sung with either a dark or playful tone, depending on the mood of the song.

(Is it obvious that I’m trying to defend the overuse of this non-word?)

If we excluded “la” and “bum” (the drum noise, not the slang for homeless person) from this list, it looks like the top words would be “little” and “sticky.”

So inspiring. So meaningful.

Even though I really thought “love” (or even “death”) would be the top result, seeing that huge “la” cracked me up. I guess not every Friends research study can have epic results.