Everyone has their favourite words. An analysis of US election speeches showed that the word Donald Trump loves most is "tremendous". A quick scan of President Jacob Zuma's speeches reveals a fondness for the word "important". Jamie Oliver likes to say "lovely" and "massive" a lot. Thanks to modern technology (funny how we never thank archaic technology), we are able to count the number of times a word appears in any author's work.Shakespeare used "sweet" 840 times in his oeuvre. EE Cummings, who wrote tremendous, important, lovely poetry without capital letters, mentioned flowers more than 100 times, and AE Housman was overly fond of "lad". John Milton used "law" 50 times in his poems, and "Hell" appeared as frequently as "love".story_article_left1I don't have a nifty tool that counts words - these writerly examples were provided by Brad Leithauser in an article called "Pet Words", published in the New Yorker in 2013.Of Joseph Conrad, Leithauser wrote: "'impenetrable' may have been the preferred pet. It certainly feels that way in Heart of Darkness, in which we meet up with an impenetrable jungle, an impenetrable forest, an impenetrable landscape, an impenetrable night, and twice, an impenetrable darkness."Funny how no writer ever mentions an entirely penetrable night, poem or philosophy.Leithauser would have had his hobby thwarted had he looked for pet words in the works of Philip Larkin. A tremendous, important, massive new biography by James Booth asserts that "a startlingly large number of words occur in a single poem only ... Larkin, it seems, waits for the best time to employ each word, gives it the most memorable context he can contrive and then never uses it again."This speaks of capacious skill as well as a formidable memory. I can't remember all the times I have used particular words. For example, I had no idea how frequently I employ the word "hedgehog" until a colleague applied a word-search tool to our archive (it was a slow day) and found that the spiny little critters have appeared in the Pedant Class no fewer than 25 times.I make no apology for this. Hedgehogs are beguiling animals and "hedgehog" is a satisfying word to write and to say.Larkin used it only once. In his poem The Mower, an unfortunate hedgehog is found "jammed up against the blades". The poet mourns: "I had seen it before, and even fed it, once / Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world / Unmendably. Burial was no help."story_article_right2Muriel Barbery's bestselling novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog is not about hedgehogs. It is about a literary concierge and a precocious child. Hedgehogs appear only in this description of the older by the younger character: "Madam Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary - and terribly elegant."Philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which he playfully said that people with a single defining idea were like hedgehogs and more mutable thinkers were like foxes. I'm not sure what that makes Trump or Zuma.Beatrix Potter's hedgehog had a single-minded focus on cleanliness. So unhedgehog-like was Mrs Tiggy-Winkle that Lucie did not realise her new buddy was a hedgehog until she'd spent an entire day helping Mrs T-W with the washing and ironing. No wonder - it's not every day one meets an aproned hedgehog up to its elbows in soap suds.I prefer my hedgehogs in the hedge, but that's no reason to criticise Miss Potter's tales. As Larkin concluded in his hedgehog poem: "We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time."..