>>>>>NOW you're talking!
>>>>
>>>>...then they will have to hunt down the cohort - as during interrogations kitty cat claimed "i tawt i taw a tweety bird".
>>>
>>>OK... someone with a handle "bird" on Tweeter... that's a start.
>>
>>Why would you want to hunt down a Roman army group?
>>Cohort - An ancient Roman military unit, comprising six centries, equal to one tenth of a legion
>
>I was using in terms # 5.
>
>co·hort [koh-hawrt] –noun
>1.a group or company: She has a cohort of admirers.
>2.a companion or associate.
>3.one of the ten divisions in an ancient Roman legion, numbering from 300 to 600 soldiers.
>4.any group of soldiers or warriors.
>5.an accomplice; abettor: He got off with probation, but his cohorts got ten years apiece.
>6.a group of persons sharing a particular statistical or demographic characteristic: the cohort of all children born in 1980.
>7.Biology . an individual in a population of the same species.
This gave me an idea. Have a dictionary at hand, and go over a text. Suffix each word with the # of the meaning in which it was used. For example
"...then#1 they#2 will#2adv have#2av to#4 hunt#10 down#8 the cohort#6 - as during#2 interrogations#5..."
I wonder what the average number would be. Specially with words where I had to name the "part of speech"*, because the same word can be all of a noun, verb, adverb, adjective and whatnot (is "will" a verb, or a noun, primarily?), appearance as the uncommon kind would have to count as well... it would lead to a very complicated metric to describe the average distance between the most common meaning/usage of the word and its usage in the given text. As professor Hotomski used to say, "colleague, one could do a masters on this subject".
* "Part of speech" is, amazingly, not a paragraph, nor do introduction, elaboration, or conclusion count as such. It's what we call "kinds of words". This confused me endlessly when our kids attended American schools. Something like "part of whose speech?" would come to mind first, before I'd get it into my skull that it relates to classification of words.
