There’s a reason NASA uses jargon.

Based on this?

http://www.rupert.id.au/resources/1000-words.php

Why isn’t laptop on that list?

Or shit?

Except that “space” as used here and “space” as used in those contexts that make it one of the “ten hundred” most used words (interesting that “thousand” isn’t one of the thousand most used words, evidently*) mean two rather different things. Are “space”, “physical extent or area; extent in two or three dimensions” and “space”, “the physical universe (excluding celestial objects) beyond the earth’s atmosphere” the same “word”? Is “set” in all its many meanings just one “lexical unit”? (Runs away ...)

Edit: apparently it is, according to this - number 480.

What words make the list are very dependent on the corpus you use to compile the list. Different domains will have different sets of words. For instance, I suspect that this cartoon would not be nearly as much fun if they’d taken the 1,000 most commonly used words on the NASA public web site.

Quite. It would have been good if Randall had indicated which study it was based on.

It’s a web comic, folks.  It’s not a scholarly treatise and he doesn’t have to cite sources.

:-) Sometimes he does, though…

So does Mallard Fillmore.

Faldage - 12 November 2012 04:30 PM

It’s a web comic, folks.  It’s not a scholarly treatise and he doesn’t have to cite sources.

Ah, but this is xkcd: we don’t want accusations of someone being wrong on the internet, do we?

Liked the comic? Use the editor! http://splasho.com/upgoer5/?i

EDIT: so it turns out Randall used this

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/Contemporary_fiction

Which _does_ in fact have shit (@ 670) but not laptop.