Everybody knows by now that Amazon.com has a new feature called "Statistically Improbable Phrases" (a name that for me recalls The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but that’s another story). I suspect these are more gadgetry than usefulness.
Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.
SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!.
This morning I was looking on Amazon for a copy of the hymnal our parish uses. The list of SIPs is kind of fun, strewn with lyric-shrapnel from the impact of all the hyphens:
stored our life, fore your throne, ceive our prayer, stroyed our death, claim your death, have mer, your glo, claim the mys, est heav, day our dai, dore thee, dore him, sus lives, all glo, ing spir, lis pec, nal rest, com pas, our mak, ver flows, qui tol, his glo, thy mer, our tres, gels sing
Most of the bits are not from hymns, but from parts of the Mass. At least two of them (at first glance) are from the Our Father. Little bits of the Latin Agnus Dei too.
I guess that makes sense. There are a lot of Protestant hymnals, after all, so those would tend to share language with Catholic hymnals, making those phrases not particularly "improbable." Except for the Mass parts, which are unique to Catholic hymnals.
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