Highly overused

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Via a mistake in how I ran a search on the content of these pages I discovered that I wrote the word "fairly" thirty times in these columns. That's the sort of word that means very little but, at least in my writing, frequently shows up. Not that it really matters, but better editing could have improved my writing.

What's interesting here, however, is that I discovered the frequent usage because I ran a search for IRL, expecting that I'd used it extensively. I discovered that I hadn't used it at all. But I mistakenly defined my search as "not case sensitive" which meant that the results included "girls", "airline", "twirl", "swirl", and even "heirloom". The use of all these, however, paled in comparison to "fairly" which had half of all those instances. It was only when I searched for IRL with "Match Case" checked that I discovered that I never used the acronym.

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Go to: You mean there's a difference?, or
Go to: It was thirty years ago today