  Statistics pedagogy values using a variety of examples. Thanks to text
resources on the Web, and since statistical packages have the ability to
analyze string data, it is now easy to use language-based examples in a
statistics class. Three such examples are discussed here. First, many types of
wordplay (e.g., crosswords and hangman) involve finding words with letters that
satisfy a certain pattern. Second, linguistics has shown that idiomatic pairs
of words often appear together more frequently than chance. For example, in the
Brown Corpus, this is true of the phrasal verb to throw up (p-value=7.92E-10.)
Third, a pangram contains all the letters of the alphabet at least once. These
are searched for in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and their lengths are
compared to the expected value given by the unequal probability coupon
collector's problem as well as simulations.

Computation and Language