The (Number of) I's Have It

(photo from freakingnews.com)

Barack Obama is a narcissist: this assertion is a widely held belief among his opponents.

However, by one measure of narcissism--his use of the first-person pronoun---the President is less self-absorbed than his predecessors:

Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania and the keeper of Language Log, a group language blog, began doing what none of [President Obama's critics] did. He counted. “I” is the most common word in English speech—but Mr Obama uses first-person singular pronouns less than all of his recent predecessors.

The utility of this method may be limited, because there's not much hard evidence to back up the correlation between narcissism and the mere enumeration of certain pronouns.

Who is the biggest user of “I” and such since 1945? Why, the colossal egotist Harry Truman, of course, followed by three Republicans, none of whom were known for arrogance: the first George Bush, Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford. Those leftists who saw George W. Bush as a swaggering cowboy should take note that he is near the back of the pack in I/my/me/mine terms, just a bit ahead of Mr Obama.

Also, IMHO, one reason for the increasing general use of "I" is a widespread effort to make speech less confrontational ("You're a loudmouth jerk" has morphed into "I feel uncomfortable when I hear someone say that.")

Nevertheless, Mr. Liberman is to be commended for lifting the discussion to the plane of analysis; let those who insist on psychoanalyzing Barack Obama (or anyone else) from a distance come up with a measure that's both reliable and verifiable. © 2014 Stephen Yuen