Saturday, May 23, 2009

Obama and the "I" Word


I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I.........



ie, yei, yei!

Clarice Feldman, noted in her post -"Obama's Verbal Onanism" an interesting aspect of President Obama's (the exceptional orator) use of the first person singular in his "Protecting our Security and Values"  speech on Friday...... Danube calculated that he said "I", 108 times! 

I know that he wasn't an English major, but, come on.......


I did a bit of an experiment. I found the complete text of Obama's national security speech from last week. Using the control-f function on my browser, I discovered that the man used the word "I" 108 times in that speech. As rendered [sic] by the NYTimes, the speech was 8+ pages--let's call it an even twelve times per page that the man said "I".

I'm reliably informed that his speech lasted 60 minutes. That's 1.8 times per minute, or one "I" every 33 seconds.

I believe that must be a record for an American president. Can anyone think of a speech that would top it?

1 comments:

Anonymous May 25, 2009 at 4:50 PM  

Bush's Farewell Speech - 13 minutes long, and 47 uses of "I". That's 3.6 uses per minute, or TWICE AS FREQUENT as the speech you are complaining about.

http://businessinfocus.blogspot.com/2009/01/transcript-president-george-w-bush.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=bush+farewell+speech+13+minutes

Transcript: Bush Speech on Iraq
Tuesday , June 28, 2005

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,160969,00.html

129 uses of the word "I". The speech lasted 28 minutes
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4724156
so that's 4.6 uses per minute.

And those were just the first two Bush transcripts that I found in a google search for Bush Speech Transcript!

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