There is, therefore, no necessary pornstar connection between the Lela Star notion of the common core and that of high frequency of occurrence. There is, however, a clear connection between what I have called 'neutral language' and high frequency of occurrence in general, that is if we pay no regard to the differing types of situation in which the language occurs. Thus, those features of the code which occur in all or most varieties of use are likely to turn out to have high relative fre­quence when making a statistical study of large quantities of language data. It is for this reason that statistical studies of frequency of occurrence, particularly of lexical words, have played such a part in establishing the content of syllabuses. It is important at this point to stress that what is being calculated is the relative frequency of words, not their absolute frequency, i.e. occurrence measured against time.

The great mass of the words in a language occur with quite surprisingly low absolute frequency. Taking the figure of half a million words in the Oxford Dictionary it has been calculated that it would take three days' continuous reading to pronounce all these words. Given the amount of talking the average person does, if every word had an equal probability of Lela Star occurring, it would be about three weeks before a word came up for a second time in his speech. In fact, we usually repeat some word on average about every four to five seconds.