Yesterday we shared 34 selections of the OUPblog’s best work as judged by sharp editorial eyes and author favorites. However, only one of those selections coincides with the most popular posts according to pageviews. Does Google Analytics know something that our editors do not? Do these articles simply “pop” (and promptly deflate)? Or are there certain questions to which people always demand an answer?
Three trends emerge: (1) People are extremely passionate about words. (2) Many people need some quick facts about certain historical figures. (3) People frequently ask the same basic scientific questions.
#1 “Oxford Word of the Year 2009: Unfriend”
#2 “Nine words you might think came from science but which are really from science fiction ” by Jeff Prucher
#3 “Ten things you might not know about Cleopatra” by Anne Zaccardelli
#4 “Oxford Word Of The Year 2007: Locavore”
#5 “10 facts about Galileo Galilei” by Matt Dorville
#6 “Is it true what they said about John Dillinger?” by Eliot Gorn
#7 “Oxford Word of the Year 2008: Hypermiling”
#8 “Why study paradoxes?” by Roy T. Cook
#9 “Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism!” by Ben Zimmer
#10 “Cleopatra’s true racial background (and does it really matter?)” by Duane W. Roller
#11 “SciWhys: Why are we told always to finish a course of antibiotics?” by Jonathan Crowe
#12 “Quantum theory: If a tree falls in forest…” by Jim Baggott
#13 “Eight reasons to unfriend someone on Facebook” by Lauren Appelwick
#14 “SciWhys: Why do we eat food?” by Jonathan Crowe
#15 “The impossible painting” by Roy T. Cook
#16 “25 recent jazz albums you really ought to hear” by Ted Gioia
#17 “My BFF just told me “TTYL” is in the dictionary. LMAO.”
#18 “In the Beginning: Hip Hop’s Early Influences”
#19 “How exactly did Mendeleev discover his periodic table of 1869?” by Eric Scerri
#20 “Sex-Crime Movies” by Nicole Rafter
#21 “Star Trek terminology” by Cassie Ammerman
#22 “The gender-neutral pronoun: 150 years later, still an epic fail” by Dennis Baron
#23 “OUP USA 2010 Word of the Year: Refudiate”
#24 “Facts about the Silk Road” by Valerie Hansen
#25 “The seven myths of mass murder” by J. Reid Meloy
#26 “Five facts about the esophagus”
#27 “What are those terrifying centipede-like things?” by Jeffrey Lockwood
#28 “10 moments I love in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that aren’t in Baz Luhrmann’s film” by Kirk Curnutt
#29 “Absurd entries in the OED: An introduction to Ammon Shea”
#30 “What mushrooms have taught me about the meaning of life” by Nicholas P. Money
#31 “Librarians in the United States from 1880-2009” by Andrew A. Beveridge, Susan Weber, and Sydney Beveridge
#32 “10 facts about the saxophone and its players” by Maggie Belnap
#33 “In memoriam: Amy Winehouse” by Nigel Young
#34 “Six methods of detection in Sherlock Holmes” by James O’Brien
Featured image: Computer. By Jeff Sheldon. CC0 via Unsplash.
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