labradore

"We can't allow things that are inaccurate to stand." — The Word of Our Dan, February 19, 2008.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Prospective

As a public service, here is a chart showing something we'll call the Prospectivity Index. That is, the incidence of the word "will", marking a verb in the future tense, as a percentage of the total words in the provincial Speech from the Throne, cleverly arranged in chronological order and colour-coded by presiding Premier of the day.

Thanks to the magic of teh intertubes, and of word count, there are now two decades worth of Thronespeechiness to work with.

[March 23rd update: error caught and corrected in the chart's legend and colour scheme.]

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1 Comments:

At 3:33 PM, March 23, 2010 , Blogger Edward Hollett said...

Interesting that in only one case was the trend overall an upward one.

All the others peaked at the front end and then died off toward what turned out to be the end of the time in office. In Williams' case the 2008 uptick follows the election the year before but even then it doesn't rise to meet the previous peaks.

And not surprisingly, 2005 - the year of the great Ottawa hand-out, the "wills" are everywhere.

 

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