How to speak like a member of Congress
In 1990 gopac, a Republican training organisation, sent a notorious memo to conservative candidates. It contained a list of positive words they should use in relation to their own party, such as “courage”, “truth” and “vision”, and negative ones to attach to Democrats, like “corruption”, “greed” and “stagnation”.
The memo’s legacy has not turned out how its authors intended. Today, Democratic lawmakers use words on its list more than Republican ones do. To evaluate the partisan slant of American media organisations (see main story), we needed to produce a list of terms that reliably distinguish the two parties’ language.
To develop our phrasebook, we gathered all speeches made in Congress between 2009 and 2022. We split the text into two-word phrases; removed uninformative words such as “in” or “the”; and de-stemmed the remaining words, so that, for example, “addiction” and “addicted” both become “addict”. This left us with a mere 2m word pairs. Next, we narrowed this list to phrases used almost exclusively by one party, and chose the phrases used by the greatest share of that party’s legislators.
2023-12-14 04:52:18
Link from www.economist.com
rnrn