It's Wednesday so you must be miserable.

Wednesday is the most miserable day of the week, claim researchers

Wednesday – not Monday – is the worst day of the week, according to research by two American applied mathematicians.

Professors Christopher Danforth and Peter Dodds, of Vermont University, analysed words used in 2.4 million internet blogs such as Twitter, giving a score out of nine depending on how positive they were.

Words like free, fun, and rainbow all scored above eight, while words such as betray, cruel, hatred and suffocate all scored less than two.

Saturday and Sunday rated predictably well but, perhaps surprisingly, Monday came out as the second happiest day of the week, partly because people were still reminiscing about the weekend. However by Wednesday, these feelings had subsided.

Professor Danforth said: "People's daily experience is being reflected somewhat in what they're saying. And this is more of a story, we think, for Twitter messages, which we've just started to pay attention to, about a year ago.

"They think they are communicating with friends, but since blogs are public we're just looking over their shoulders.

"The weekends tend to be fairly happy and Wednesday turned out to be the saddest day."

He said using the internet in this way enabled them to rate happiness based on higher numbers of people than previous studies.

"What we're attempting to do is measure collective happiness on a much larger scale, similar to measuring the temperature outside," Professor Danforth said.

"The energy of a few molecules bouncing around doesn't give a good indication of heat, you need billions or more."

Source: Telegraph

Do agree? What is your least favourite day of the week? Why?
What words do you like most? And which do you like least?


Phrasal Verbs:

turn out: to happen in a particular way or to have a particular result, to be known or discovered finally and surprisingly
  • How did the recipe turn out? It turned out really well. I'll make it again. (salir bien)
  • It turned out that they had been to the same university.
  • He turned out to be a really interesting guy. He's had such an exciting life.
  • It had been raining all morning but it turned out to be a sunny afternoon.
  • As things turned out, they were both wrong

Comments

Sir Joseph said…
Hi Graham,

If they say that the most miserable day of the weekend is Wednesday, it will be true, but it´s a surprise for me. I think that the way to get this result isn´t good. This method doesn´t prove that people prefer a day of the week about another one. They have analysed words that people said in internet blogs but you can say that one thing is good in Twitter and you can say that other thing is not good at the same moment but they count two expressions as good, while you have said not good, for instance. I think.

My least favourite day of the week is Sunday because I see that the weekend is ending and a hard week is going to begin. It´s very miserable. My favourite day of the week is Friday because I enjoy thinking that I have two days to relax. Wednesday is good for me because I only have to work two days.

I like words like future, human being, personality, elephant, María, reality, research, know, beyond, we, yes, rainbow, enable and so on.

I like least words like failure, folk, finish, snore, awkward, gobbledygook, isolate, throughout, hatred, cattle and so on.

See you.
Graham said…
Good afternoon José,

We can't be surprised that the average person is less happy midweek. I think it is worse when you have a bad day at the weekend or on a public holiday.

I actually like the word "awkward" because of how it sounds. Why wouldn't you like "cattle"?



If they say that the most miserable day of the weekend is Wednesday, it must be true, but it´s a surprise for me. I think that the way that they arrived at this result isn´t good. This method doesn´t prove that people prefer one day of the week over another one. They have analysed words that people have used in internet blogs but you can say that one thing is good on Twitter and you can say that another thing is not good at the same moment but they count two expressions as good, while you have said not good, for instance. I think. (I'm sure that makes sense, if only I could get my head around it.)

My least favourite day of the week is Sunday because I see that the weekend is ending and a hard week is going to begin. It´s a¡absolutely miserable. My favourite day of the week is Friday because I enjoy thinking that I have two days to relax. Wednesday is good for me because I only have to work another two days.

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