The Power of ‘We’

Wednesday, 26 January 2011 | by Pat's Picks

I came across a great analysis while pouring over coverage of last night’s State of the Union address. The BBC took the text from every presidential address since 1790 and ran them through a word counter. Then they looked at which “nouns and adjectives (and one pronoun)” showed up the most frequently over the past 221 years. ‘We’ was the hands-down winner. It’s been used by US presidents 10, 960 times in their State of the Union addresses.

Other words that made the top ten are pretty predictable—‘government’ came in at number two with 7,036 mention; ‘war’ clenched the number-eight spot with 2,757. But what I found most interesting were the graphs the BBC put together showing when usage of the words ebbed and flowed. For example, ‘people’ hit it’s highest notes during political unrest of the 1960s and 70s and then again in the 90s when Bill Clinton used it to “invoke the will of the “people” as he tussled with a Republican Congress.” Similarly, ‘we’ became the word du jour in the late 20th century, mirroring the rise of mass media. President Obama’s speech from last night wasn’t included in the analysis but none of the words that made up his favorite phrase last night, ‘win the future’, made the list.

(I should point out that ‘the’ and ‘of’ were the actual winners of the tally but were left out, as were “to”, “and”, “in”, “a” and “that.” There’s a full explanation of the methodology when you click through to the BBC.)