I shoot people in this hat

This website was made for Weird Web October’s day 8, the theme being “hashtags”. Before social media and the rise of hashtags, we had “tag clouds”; visual cloud-like word clouds containing tags of the content on a blog or website. Larger text in the cloud meant that the word had more frequency across the site.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger is one of my favourite books. Many people recall studying it as it was a prescribed text in some schools, and therefore hated it—or grew to hate it. There was a general mockery of this classic text, with a particular disdain for the overuse of the word “phony”. Throwing the text into a tag cloud generator shows that the word was only used 45 times, compared to the word “goddam”, “hell”, and even “damn”, being used 244, 232, and 124 times respectively. Understandably, the names of the characters Phoebe, Stradlater, and Ackley turn up a bunch of times more than the word “phony”; “bastard” beats the word phony 14 times.

I used a tag cloud generator to generate the tags. The image/favicon is from PinClipart (licensed for personal use). A free PDF copy of The Catcher in the Rye has circulated around the internet for quite some time now, while the legacy of the character of Holden Caulfield lives on.