Popular Presidential Talk

Yes, I'm home blogging about presidents on a Saturday night. The following is just too amazing to resist. And in my defense, I am sick with a cold so really, this is more like a weeknight.

The U.S. Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud generator "shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2006." It is absolutely fascinating to scroll through each president over time and see the catch phrases and themes that have stood out.

For example,
Poor John Adams' (1791-1801) most popular words are a tad on the boring side, such as "assembly", "multitude", and "qualifications" but they also show the much more impressive language used in his era. My favourites? "Arcadia" "industrious" "sober" and "fruitful".

Aside from the inherent neat-factor of the language, it is also really amazing to trace word usage by what was happening historically during the times these presidents governed. Something like the word "communist", which doesn't make an appearance here until Eisenhower (1950s, of course), stays constant right through JFK and LBJ (minus his Great Society address), sporadically through Nixon's era (interesting given the change of emphasis when he went into Vietnam, regardless of his personal views on the whole communist thing!) and then pretty much dissapears, at least in the papers referenced here, post-Vietnam.

The word "war" appears in every presidential tag cloud.

That is all. Sign me up for the history lover of the month/lifetime club.