After listing to incoming President Obama’s inauguration address this morning I thought it would be fun to compare what he had to say with what outgoing President Bush said in his 2005 address. I could have spent some time reading and re-reading the transcripts of both speeches, taking notes and comparing and contrasting the two, and trying to come up with something original and witty to say about them. But that sounded like a lot of work.

I’ve long been an advocate of figuring out ways to make my computer to as much of my work for me as possible, and this is no exception. So I whipped together a quick PHP script to parse through both speeches, and do a word for word comparison of the two. The graph below is the result of this experiment.

Some things of note. Bush’s speech contained 2052, while Obama’s was slightly wordier with 2369 words in his. Obama has a larger vocabulary with 911 unique words used compared to Bush’s 748. Bush likes to talk about freedom, liberty and history, while Obama favors the topics of work, our generation, and people (us, we, you, people all ranked high).

Overall, I really liked seeing how much President Obama uses words like us, we, and our.

Make of it what you will. I think there’s a lot that can be taken from these numbers. What do you see in all these words?