as far as I can remember

"There’s a name for this effect. It’s called Zipf’s law, after George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950), a philologist and professor at Harvard University. He discovered that the most popular word in the English language (“the”) is used ten times more than the tenth most popular word, 100 times more than the 100th most popular word and 1,000 times more than the 1,000th most popular word."

"Unleashing the idea virus" by Seth Godin