Fun With (Presidential) Words

 

Okay, I admit it. I’m behind the times here at Chateau Chat Valliant, so it’s likely that you all know about this already. But I’ve just been pointed to Wordle, a very cool word tool. On the offchance that you don’t know what it is, the site explains:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

It’s fun, it’s addictive, and it’s also very informative.

For example, out of idle curiousity (and at the prompting of commenter Stoutcat’s Sister), I “wordled”  the text of two separate presidential inauguration speeches, to see if it could tell me anything about the ideas and aspirations of the speakers. I left the standard defaults in place (it omits common words like “the”, “with”, “and”, etc.), and here’s what I got:

                                                            Inaugural Speech A

                                                            Inaugural Speech B

The two speeches were Barack H. Obama’s 2009 Inaugural speech, and George W. Bush’s 2004 Inaugural speech. Can you tell which is which? (Click on each image for larger versions.)

Stoutcat