Thread by @umblaetterer

Just published @DSHjournal: "‘The Michael Jordan of greatness’—Extracting #VossianAntonomasia from two decades of The New York Times, 1987–2007" – DOI: doi.org/10.1093/llc/fq… – Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/1902.06428 – with Robert Jäschke @IBI_HU. #DigitalHumanities @nytimes

Blogpost with some background: "#VossianAntonomasia in 'The New York Times'" weltliteratur.net/vossian-antono…

We also just published a website with some more data to explore: vossanto.weltliteratur.net @nytimes

For example, here's a complete list of all 2,646 extracted #VossianAntonomasia expressions from 20 years of @nytimes (1987–2007), ranging from "the Madonna of college football" to "the Marco Polo of baseball": vossanto.weltliteratur.net/theof/humans/v…

#VossianAntonomasia is named after Dutch humanist Gerardus Vossius (1577–1649). He noticed that this special form of antonomasia was in use since antiquity, but it had never been discussed in rhetoric before. He filled that gap in his "Institutiones oratoriae".

(img: WM Commons)

A good definition of #VossianAntonomasia can be found in Heinrich Lausberg's fantastic "Handbook of Literary Rhetoric", in §581: books.google.com/books?id=Jxck6…

Ranking of the top-40 paragons extracted from @nytimes 1987–2007: 1. @Jumpman23, 2. Rodney Dangerfield, 3. Babe Ruth, 6. @BillGates, 7. @realDonaldTrump, @Madonna, 12. @TigerWoods, 22. @RalphNader, 24. @Oprah, @Susan_Lucci … Full list: vossanto.weltliteratur.net/theof/humans/s…

And here's a gallery of the top-40 paragons extracted from the @nytimes corpus 1987–2007. (In-)famous people that journalists would use to describe lesser known people: vossanto.weltliteratur.net/theof/humans/s… (images automatically pulled from @wikidata via Property:P18)

Meet … the Walt Disney, the Bill Gates and the Frank Sinatra of Japan! One function of #VossianAntonomasia is inculturation. If you limit the list of modifiers to countries, you'll find Japan, China and Brazil on top: vossanto.weltliteratur.net/theof/humans/s…

#VossianAntonomasia knows interesting variations. E.g., the title of our paper – "[Michael Jordan is] the Michael Jordan of greatness" @Jumpman23 – is a direct quote by @BarackObama (wapo.st/2fD96iF) who implements recursivity into VA, using an identical source & target.

Critics Stephen Holden and Janet Maslin were the most prolific users of #VossianAntonomasia in their articles for @nytimes between 1987–2007. Here are all successfully extracted paragons coined/used by @JanetMaslin: vossanto.weltliteratur.net/theof/humans/s…

Last not least, our absolute favourite among the thousands of expressions extracted from @nytimes: the first version of @Microsoft Word (1983) was dubbed "the Marquis de Sade of word processors, which was not altogether unfair". 😊 nytimes.com/1993/09/26/bus…

The @nytimes article containing most #VossianAntonomasia expressions (6!) is this one: nytimes.com/2002/02/24/mag… – Meet … the David Frost, the Dan Rather, the Frank Sinatra, the Larry King and the Mel Brooks of Iran, as well as "the Rupert Murdoch of the Farsi-speaking world".

We just added relative frequency of #VossianAntonomasia usage @nytimes: vossanto.weltliteratur.net/theof/humans/s… – Looks like @kimmelman is the king of VA 🏆, using it in every 84th article on average, followed by @maureendowd; @JanetMaslin ranking 5th. (authors with > 1,000 articles)