Pollyanna

At the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, we are reminded, in a singalong, to “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” It’s a pitch black comic moment, because, as you know if you’ve seen the film, the titular Messiah Brian and others singing have all been crucified and are waiting to die. But researchers have long theorized that it’s not so far off, and there is a natural tendency in human languages to use happy words even if things aren’t going so well. Called the “Pollyanna Hypothesis,” after the sickeningly optimistic character immortalized by Hayley Mills in a Disney movie, the idea has been floating since 1969 as “Put even more simply humans tend to look on (and talk about) the bright side of life.” But it was a difficult idea to test in 1969. Now, we have the internet, and a team at University of Vermont and The MITRE Corporation were able to test billions of words in multiple languages to confirm the idea. We really