A friend passes along a trivium, which churned in the mind beginning immediately. It is that the typical man utters 10,000 words every day, the woman, 25,000. As is one's way on coming upon stray data, the tendency is to translate them into familiar integers like: It's about a thousand miles to Chicago from New York, and to the moon is 240,000 miles. That's the equivalent of 120 round-trips to Chicago.
Ten thousand words a day each for Al Gore and George W., 25,000 each for Tipper and Laura. Of course, that assumes they will be speaking during the campaign at about the average rate. One supposes, at first, that in a day of campaigning, they will speak more -- all those addresses and stump speeches and the lot. On the other hand, maybe between speeches they are permitted to clam up ("Karl, don't chat with Al. He has to save up for the speeches in Bloomington, Indianapolis and Cleveland ..."). All Al needs to say at that point is, "Shut up, Tipper!" and to say that doesn't use up a lot of words.
One tends to take the measure of great quantities by building on familiar standards, as mentioned. As a boy I attended a school at which every student was required to give a 1,000-word speech once every academic year to the entire body of students (80). The headmaster allotted five to seven minutes for this torture (torture both for the speechmaker and his audience). We are to construe, from the data, that men tend to speak, between waking and bedtime, 10 times the volume spoken by the terror-stricken boy speaking nonstop to the school assembly. That's the equivalent of rattling off 10 speeches every day. And! -- in the case of the woman -- 25 speeches per day. A waking day being, say, 16 hours, the woman's allotment comes to 1,500 words per hour. Granted, these words are not, like the boy speechmakers', spoken back to back. If that were so, we'd have 12,000 words per hour.
The telephone company would no doubt tell you how many words are spoken in a typical minute by a typical phone-user. I knew a man married to a friendly woman whose beneficences were regularly communicated over the telephone to family and friends. The husband would sit in the living room, reading the paper or a book, and every few minutes would permit himself to say, simply -- "TCCM." That meant: Telephone Calls Cost Money. After a half-dozen of those, his wife would clutch down and soon, utter a few words of farewell, putting down the telephone. How many words would she have spoken? And is the ratio -- 25 to 10 -- here suggested nicely caught? She is warbling along about this and that, up against his simple "TCCM"?