Wordsearch: Beginning with endings

A search through the Guardian Weekly archive for the beginnings of words lets us see their frequency. Looking at the ends of words, however, lets us investigate word classes, and this gives a very different view of things. I've looked at words ending in -ion ; a set of abstract nouns that have high social significance. The most frequent …ion words: million, election, union, action, decision and administration remind us of how a primary purpose of newspapers is to report on the actions of powerful people and organisations. If you exclude words such as union and administration , you find a different and intriguing series. This begins with: action, decision and question : all of which relate to things that people with power do. Next in the list are information, position, and situation : essential resources for these decision makers. The series finishes with operation, corruption, attention and opinion ; all of which are linked to what can help or hinder actions. I found it interesting that action collocates strongly with military, legal, affirmative, class (a collective legal action), direct and industrial , while decisions tend to be political, final, right, final, controversial or surprise , and are linked to institutions such as government and court , or to people such as Bush, US, Blair, and Clinton . Question doesn't seem to be associated with people or places, but it is very frequently qualified as being: big, real, key, open, important, simple, good, central, crucial, obvious or fundamental ; while information tends to be personal, classified, sensitive, false, vital, secret, confidential, public or detailed . Further down the list we find that operations tend to be strongly linked with security, whether this is: military, rescue, peacekeeping, security, police, relief, sting, terrorist, smuggling or surveillance . Finally, that most ubiquitous of abstract nouns corruption . Although no one seems to like it ( corruption collocates strongly with against, alleged, anti, end, fight, fighting and tackle ) it gets everywhere, being: endemic, global, government, moral, official, pervasive, police, political, rampant and widespread . Clearly we still need independent investigative journalism to keep an eye on those in power.