What is Kevin Saying?

by Stubborn Mule on 18 August 2009 · 26 comments

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 the Stubborn Mule was lucky enough to have OldFuzz do the hard work, assembling over 400 pages of text constituting Kevin Rudd’s speeches from 2009. If he has the time and inclination, prior years may follow. And here is what it looks like as a word cloud.

It is no surprise that, just as Barrack 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. While “global”, “world”, “national”,  “economy” and “economic” are all appropriately big-picture words for a prime minister to be using.

There are a few intriguing words looming from the cloud. It seems that Mr 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 fleeting strange that the word “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.

So, peruse the cloud at your leisure and make of it what you will. Of course, please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

UPDATE: an abridged version of this post has appeared on The Punch.

* Here is a case-insensitive version of the word cloud.

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