Since this linguistic-statistical study of an obsession might well prove to be an important contribution to psycholinguistics, I decided to make a larger sample of watery words, choosing the straightforward journals of Colonel Peter Egerton Warburton, who led an expedition across the western interior of Australia in 1873 - 4. In a randomly chosen sequence of ten pages ( 151 - 60 of the published journal ) there were twenty-eight occurrences of the word water ( eight of them in compounds ), no page being without at least one example.
Since this linguistic-statistical study of an obsession could be important to psycholinguistics, I have made a larger sample of watery words from the journals of Colonel Peter Egerton Warburton, who led a voyage across the western interior of Australia in 1873-4. In a random sequence of ten pages from the journal (151-60) there were 28 forms of the word water, and every page had at least one example.