This is kind of a cool tool from NYTimes.com - it’s a State of the Union speech analyzer (free reg. may be req’d).

You plug in any word that you want to analyze, and it will look for that word in all the speeches from 2001 up to Tuesday night’s, giving you the prevalence and contexts of that word.  A couple of interesting stats of note:

A.  Usage of “freedom” and “liberty” took dives from previous years, while “terror” is holding steady.

B.  Use of the word “the” is up from 333 to a whopping 418!  Bush is making bold strides into definite articles!

C.  He used the word “words” twice, up from 1 time in 2006.  Despite his critics, our president is twice as good with words as he was last year.

D.  “C**k-sucking bastards” and “bad-ass muthaf**kers” continues to be eschewed by presidential speechwriters, showing up 0 times each in the last 7 years.

And as a fun side-note on the speeches, here’s a measurement of all that ridiculous applause that pervades every State of the Union.  28% of Tuesday’s address was applause!  In 49 minutes of speech, we were witness to 61 rounds of applause.  All for a time-honored tradition of stating a bunch of stuff they’re never going to follow through on.  Jackasses.

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