A linguistic win for W: or, "What 'I' Means"

A linguistic win for W: or, "What 'I' Means"

This NYT article reports on a paper published in The Journal of Research in Personality in which Richard Slatcher analyzes Kerry's and W's political speech, determining that W's speech "was most like that of an older person, because, as people do when they age, he used fewer first-person singular words, more positive-emotion words, and had "a greater focus on the future...". Kerry's speech on the other hand was more like that of a depressed person, "because of his high use of first-person singular words, physical words like "ache" and negative-emotion words like "hate," along with low use of positive-emotion words, like "happy."

Interesting the relation between first person singular words and depression. It seems intuitive though at some level. The rest isn't so surprising. What is fun though is that W finally wins one in language, especially so given the drubbing he's taken since day 1 for his creative/special use of morphology and syntax.