The following article by Chris Tribble discusses the uses of words used in conjunction with sex and death in the (Manchester) Guardian Weekly.

Inescapable sex and death

I've been writing this column since 2004, but I've just realised that while I've covered a lot of ground - from colour adjectives to love and hate - I've not touched on the areas that are at the heart of the human condition: Eros and Thanatos (sex and death). Maybe I've been wondering where I would go from there? Still, as we all have to deal with these at some time, here goes.

First some numbers. Death (11,688) is mentioned more frequently than sex (4,534), and if you combine the counts for all death-related word forms you find a massive 22, 580 instances (ranging from deathbed to deadlock), compared with a total of only 9,421 for those that are sex-related. Sex-related words (21 word types) are much more varied than their death counterparts, and include everything from sexual through to sexologists.

The words that most strongly associate with death and sex are quite depressing. Sex is most often found in two contexts: the legal, offender, abuse, offences; and the social, discrimination, workers, slaves, couples, education, marriage, scandal, along with the completely unrelated Sex Pistols. The sexual top ten starts with: harassment, abuse, misconduct, assault, offences, assaults, although it also includes orientation, activity, intercourse and abstinence. Overall the picture is of a distorted and unhappy sexuality.

Dead, dying and death are also found in miserable company. Using mutual information statistical methods (go the mutual information statistical methods web site to learn more) we find that dead is found most often in the same environment as injured, wounded, alive, bodies and man's and that dying co-occurs with aids, cancer, breed and hunger.

Death is most commonly found with penalty, toll, squads, row, sentence, threats, knell, certificates, but also Diana and Princess. A testament perhaps to the way in which the Princess of Wales's tragedy combines sex and death in such powerful ways.