Obama's State of the Union Pronouns Are Both Banal and Irrelevant

​It's time for yet another State of the Union, and therefore, also time for political pundits to accuse Barack Obama of saying "I" too many times, because he's an arrogant egg-head, or something stupid like that.

The incomparable linguistics blog Langu​age Log has devoted a number of posts to tearing this idea down, not because Language Log is mostly written by fellow academics/godless liberals, but because it just doesn't make sense. Obama's use of the first-person singular pronoun in State of the Union addresses is completely unremarkable; out of the thirteen American presidents since 1934, Obama's ratio of "we" to "I" in SOTUs puts him at eighth. He uses "I" less than Presidents Ford, Clinton, and George H.W. Bush.

Open it up to other pronouns—because maybe narcissists are secretly really the ones always saying "you" or "we"—and Obama's still squarely in the middle of the pack, using first-person-plural pronouns less than Carter, Truman, or Reagan, and using second-person pronouns less than either of the Bushes or Clinton.

As Mark Liberman notes​ at Language Log, although someone just mentioned it over at the National Journal today, the "Obama Says 'I' Too Much" Meme is almost completely played out and falling out of favor, which can only be a good thing. If you care about the SOTU, you should probably pay attention to the whole sentence, not just whether it starts with "I" or "we."

But that's not to say that pronouns can't tell you something about the speaker. James Pennebaker is a professor in the psychology departmen​t at University of Texas, and the author of the book The Secret Life of​ Pronouns, wherein he demonstrates the correlations that textual analysis reveals between how something is said and the state of the person who is saying it. If you've got a right-wing, pronoun-based critique of Obama to write, I'd call it required reading.

It's worth pointing out that "I" is the most frequently used word in the English language, so we're all saying it a lot, but some people use it more. Pennebaker wrote up a little quiz you can take to test your assumptions about who uses "I" more, th​at you're welcome to take. Better do it now, because I'm going to spoil it for you in the next sentence: women use "I" more than men; followers use it more than leaders, people telling the truth use it more than liars, young people more than old, poor people more than rich, depressed people more than happy ones.

Can this tell us anything about Barack Obama, as compared to other presidents? Credit his speechwriters or call him a centrist to a fault, but since Obama is squarely in middle when it comes to "I," not really. It's an interesting tool for analyzing speech and psychological states, but when it comes to State of the Unions, you're better off, I'm sorry to say, paying attention.