Not anxious enough about the election?
Try this: Global Language Monitor says its study of the use of political buzzwords being used around the world signify, not the landslide some are predicting, but "a very close election, favoring Obama very slightly."
True, the top word, as measured in news stories and on the internet is -- you guessed it -- change (and the second, somewhat surprisingly, given the relative lack of news coverage, is global warming/climate change.
But Paul JJ Payack tells the blog at babbel.com that it's buzzwords that develop in the summer of an election year that have the most influence. In this election, he says, he's been impressed at the intensity of the word experience, which -- strangely enough -- bodes ill more for Barack Obama than Sarah Palin.
… there’s this myth out there that there’s this 24-hour news cycle. And there is, insofar as how you read on the internet, they have to change it all the time to keep people’s interest. But what we found, when an issue surfaces, it goes into blogs, media archives, it surfaces in different places, it bounces around the media echo chamber, and all of a sudden it becomes more pronounced. So flip flopping was an issue in July (2004), — and in elections people always talk about the October surprise – meaning something about candidate that you don’t have enough time to recover from, a scandal or something. But what we found was that the events in July and August were more important than events that happened in October. Because the flip flopping etc. that were big in July and August had time in the echo chamber of the internet to magnify themselves. So they didn’t go away after 24 hours. The thing that most influenced the election was the August surprise, not the October surprise.
So we look at the midterm elections in the same way, we see the same thing happen, and we’re looking at this election cycle in the same way. Two days ago they were talking about Obama having a fourteen point lead, and 300 electoral votes as opposed to the 271 you need… in other words a landslide. But when we look at our PQI numbers, political buzzwords, we don’t see that. We see the issues beneath the surface that the media is not talking about, because it’s not a 24 hour thing, it’s a longer term thing. What we see is a very close election, favoring Obama very slightly.
Looking at political buzzwords, we see that the number five word right now is experience. We have Sarah Palin, who’s relatively inexperienced, and people love her or hate her for a whole host of reasons, but still, experience is an issue for her. But when we look beneath the surface a bit, Obama’s name is associated with inexperience 2.4 times more than it is with Palin. So that tells us that the experience issue has not gone away, it actually has a bigger impact on the election than traditional media see right now, because they’re looking in the 24-hour, the poll from today, what’s happening right now.
I'm not sure I buy this . . . but it does present one other thing to worry about as I compulsively call up the polls.