"I" again?

August 23, 2024 @ 7:01 am · Filed by under Language and politics, Psychology of language

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From Bill Clinton's 2024 DNC speech:

I mean look,
what does their opponent do with his voice? He mostly
talks about himself
right?
So the next time you
hear him, don't count the lies.
Count the I's.
Count the I's.
His
vendettas, his vengeance,
his complaints,
his conspiracies.
He's like one of those tenors
opening up
before he walks out on stage like I did, trying to get his
lungs open by singing, "Me, me, me, me, me, me."

This evokes the long series of false pundit assertions about Barack Obama, especially by George F. Will, from June 2019 to May 2012 and beyond.

Will's assertions about Obama's pronoun frequency were shameless lies, but they were irrelevant to his larger point anyhow, since first-person pronoun usage is not a good metric for egocentricity or narcissism or whatever. See the discussion about Chris Christie's pronouns in "First Person Singular, Redemption Plea Edition" (1/11/2014), or the more general discussion by Jamie Pennebaker in "What is 'I' saying?" (8/9/2009).

Putting aside the pragmatics and social psychology of pronoun use, Geoff Pullum suggested that I might count

[U]ses of (wordforms of) the first-person singular pronoun lexeme in (i) speeches by Harris and (ii) speeches by Trump. Tailor-made for a Breakfast Experiment™.

So here we go — but I'll add Clinton's DNC speech to the project.

Donald Trump RNC2024: 12586 words, 265 I's (2.1%), 348 FPSP (2.8%)
Kamala Harris DNC2024: 3697 words, 83 I's (2.2%), 127 FPSP (3.4%)
Bill Clinton DNC2024: 2458 words, 66 I's (2.75%), 88 FPSP (3.6%)

I'll spare you the counts and percentages for the many other speeches by these personalities that I've analyzed, but suffice it to say that Bill Clinton's jibe is not empirically supported — at least in terms of pronoun counts.

A more sophisticated analysis (perhaps of a different data source) might yield a different answer. I didn't count "his vendettas, his vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies". But here as elsewhere, crude pronoun counts are not easily mapped to personality dimensions.

Update — an effective image, making the same point without counting pronouns:

And some others:

August 23, 2024 @ 7:01 am · Filed by under Language and politics, Psychology of language


14 Comments

  1. Cervantes said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 8:17 am

    Well okay, but Clinton's assertion that Orange Julius mostly talks about himself is certainly true. "Count the Is" is essentially metaphorical, he isn't literally asking us to do it. And the bit about warming up with "me me me me" is a joke.

  2. Laura Morland said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 8:18 am

    Interesting Breakfast Experiment!

    I'm curious: from the Bill Clinton data set, did you eliminate the 2 uses of "I" referring to KH's opponent ("Count the I's")?

    And I would argue that the filler phrase "I mean" is usually semantically equivalent to "you know" and not truly self-referential.

  3. Daniel Deutsch said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 8:48 am

    When I heard Clinton’s speech, I started a countdown clock waiting for Mark Liberman to write about this.

  4. J.W. Brewer said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 8:50 am

    I am delighted to see Geoff Pullum giving us new Language Log posts, even if at one remove.

  5. Mark Liberman said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 11:49 am

    @Cervantes: "Count the Is" is essentially metaphorical, he isn't literally asking us to do it."

    Do you think that Will's claims about Obama were also metaphorical?

    If you struck from Barack Obama’s vocabulary the first-person singular pronoun, he would fall silent, which would be a mercy to us and a service to him, actually.

    That's obviously hyperbolic, but I believe that he meant to assert that Obama over-used first-person-singular pronouns…

  6. Haamu said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 1:06 pm

    I don't see a lot of value in raw "I/me/my" counts. What about a ratio of "I" to "we" and "you"?

    Or some way of accounting for context? I would have expected Harris's first-person singular count from last night to be atypically high, since a principal purpose of the speech was for her to introduce herself to the country and add a lot of autobiographical detail.

  7. Mark Liberman said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 1:46 pm

    @Haamu: "What about a ratio of "I" to "we" and "you"?":

    See https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1489,
    https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4103, etc.

  8. Mark Liberman said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 1:48 pm

    @Haamu: "Or some way of accounting for context? I would have expected Harris's first-person singular count from last night to be atypically high, since a principal purpose of the speech was for her to introduce herself to the country and add a lot of autobiographical detail.":

    Indeed — see "First Person Singular, Redemption Plea Edition" (1/11/2014), linked in the OP…

  9. Mark Liberman said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 2:03 pm

    @Haamu:

    Overall pronoun counts for the cited speeches by Trump, Harris, and Clinton — from which you can calculate whatever ratios you like…

    Trump RNC2024:

    289 we
    265 i
    206 you
    139 our
    43 my
    38 me
    29 us
    27 your
    2 mine
    2 we're

    Harris DNC2024:

    83 i
    51 you
    49 we
    48 our
    28 my
    28 us
    16 me
    7 your

    Clinton DNC2024:

    66 i
    48 you
    40 we
    19 our
    16 us
    15 me
    7 my
    5 your
    1 yours

  10. David Morris said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 6:02 pm

    Offhand, I seem to remember that Jesus said "i" a lot.

  11. J.W. Brewer said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 8:20 pm

    David Morris: Well, Jesus wasn't speaking English. So it's actually worse than that. The writers of all four Gospels have [H/h]im saying ἐγὼ with some frequency when referring to [H/h]imself. Which transliterates as "ego." As in "egomaniac." I think any armchair pundit should be able to connect the dots from there.

  12. Viseguy said,

    August 24, 2024 @ 12:31 am

    Bill Clinton's bit about "count the I's" and "me me me me" was a dig at Trump, obviously, but it was also (and, I think, mainly) the setup for a punch line: Elect KH and "every day will begin with 'you, you, you, you.'" Not an invitation to count pronouns, but a cute and auditory way to contrast the two candidates' characters.

  13. Philip Taylor said,

    August 24, 2024 @ 3:53 am

    It sems to me that if anyone has the (divine) right to be an egomaniac, then the Son of God must come pretty high on the list …

  14. ~flow said,

    August 26, 2024 @ 2:31 am

    Philip Taylor said

    > It sems to me that if anyone has the (divine) right to be an egomaniac, then the Son of God must come pretty high on the list …

    Trump in 2019: "I am the Chosen One"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP-LmzYYrMQ

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