Editing Talk:458: Regrets

Don't know how the original measure was made, but for curiosity's sake I just now checked the current raw Google search results for full-quoted "I should have kissed her" and its variants.  That's "should" vs. "shouldn't" vs. "should not" (more imperative?), "have" vs. "...'ve" vs. "of" (to catch the ungrammatical) and of course "him" vs. "her" vs. "them" (plural/ungendered?) vs. "it" (..?).

Here are the figures reported (larger ones having been rounded to "About..." so many thousands).  Some results (especially the main "should have kissed her" version) obviously were inclusive of the comic itself and direct references like this Wiki, and blogs from XKCD lovers and XKCD-haters alike who decided to make their own commentary.

{| class="wikitable"
! ..kissed       !! Her                       !! Him                       !! Them                    !! It 
|-
|Should have     || align="right" | 1,120,000 || align="right" |   446,000 || align="right" | 310,000 || align="right" | 859,000
|-
|Shouldn't have  || align="right" | 4,100,000 || align="right" | 1,110,000 || align="right" |       6 || align="right" |       1
|-
|Should not have || align="right" | 2,730,000 || align="right" |   542,000 || align="right" |       7 || ="shouldn't have"
|-
|colspan=3|
|-
! ..kissed     !! Her                     !! Him                     !! Them                   !! It 
|-
|Should've     || align="right" | 799,900 || align="right" | 274,000 || align="right" | 94,000 || align="right" | 6
|-
|Shouldn't've  || colspan="4" rowspan="2" | (Forced to "shouldn't have"... fair enough.)
|-
|Should not've
|-
|colspan=3|
|-
! ..kissed     !! Her                    !! Him                    !! Them                  !! It 
|-
|Should of     || align="right" | 24,900 || align="right" | 18,500 || align="right" | 1,050 || align="right" | 411
|-
|Shouldn't of  || align="right" |  6,840 || align="right" |  6,180 || align="right" |     - || align="right" |   -
|-
|Should not of || align="right" |  6,840 || align="right" |  6,180 || align="right" |     - || align="right" |   1
|}

(Not everything is as intended.  The lone "I should not of kissed it" result sends one to "...and i should not of kissed. it is the least i could do...", for example.)

Was going to try alternatives to "kissed", but might have gotten unwieldy.  (And imagine the furore at Prism HQ for repeated searches using "killed"!)

I'll just leave this here for analysis and combining related figures however you so feel like.  Not sure if the "of" camps are nicely small figures, in comparison, or still too uncomfortably large for my liking... [[Special:Contributions/178.107.249.215|178.107.249.215]] 22:09, 13 June 2013 (UTC)