People tell me that I frequently make square dance puns. When they aren't dancers themselves, they just don't understand how much these words come up in everyday conversation, or how some random phrase could have the feeling "that could be a call!". I wanted to demonstrate what square dancing vocabulary looked like so I grabbed the lists of calls and concepts, basic through C3B from
Vic's list and the "Lynette teach tapes" C4 from
Dana's flashcards, cleaned them up a little, and put them into a
webapp for making custom word clouds. Cleaning involved naively tokenizing the calls and removing words used to list concepts or calls with parameters (e.g. anyone, fraction) as much as formatting characters. I don't claim to have done it comphrensively or even well =). There are also many ways to list / count calls, and this is just one arbitrary way.
The moral of the story is that we ought to be calling this activity "cross dancing" (
already taken?).
Basic through C4:
Basic through Plus is much less intimidating:
For calls, I think it would be cool to look at n-grams rather than just single words, but the 1-grams would dominate so maybe they'd have to be examined separately.
