Last week, Politico published an analysis of Barack Obama’s language. The words he used most often were “America”, “Health” and “Economy” (Politico included “American” in the count along with “America”). This prompts the obvious question: what are the favourite words of our own Kevin Rudd?
Fortunately, the prime minster’s website publishes transcripts of all Kevin’s public utterances (although this does not include his speeches in parliament). There is a lot there and I had some help assembling over 400 pages of text constituting Kevin Rudd’s speeches from 2009. And above is what it looks like as a word cloud.
It is no surprise that, just as Obama is fond of saying “America” and “American”, so too Kevin Rudd likes to say “Australia” and “Australian”. He also throws in “Australians” reasonably frequently. It seems in keeping with his public-servant mandarin style that Rudd uses the word “Government” more liberally than does Obama. Others like “global”, “world”, “national”, “economy” and “economic” are all appropriately big-picture words for a prime minister to be using.
There are a few intriguing finds. It seems Rudd says “also” a lot. Given that this analysis is case sensitive, we can also glean that Rudd frequently starts his sentences with the word “Building”. It may seem strange that “cent” appears so prominently, but then again it is matched in size by the word “per”, so we are just seeing common use of “per cent” - not some homespun wisdom about watching the small denominations of money.
Make of it what you will. Of course, please share your thoughts in the comments.
Ed’s note: This is an edited version of a post from Sean’s blog, A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective, where a more detailed version of this post can be found, including a different rendering of the word cloud.
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