Mission Statements and Independence: Using Wordle and NGrams to Spot Trends

Taking everyone by surprise, the most used word in Bucknell’s mission statement is ‘Bucknell’. Aside from that, words such as learning, students, and diverse are also used fairly often. Words like passion, environment, and strive are left out in the cold, being used sparingly in the mission statement. Looking at my beautiful Wordle, my impression is that Bucknell is very concerned about its identity as a liberal arts school, making sure to reiterate the words liberal and diverse, along with the words intellectual, residential, and programs.

My awesome Wordle is more awesome than yours.

For my next trick, I have entered the word “Bucknell” into NGram. The resulting graph shows that, since 1920, the word has had three major spikes in usage. Now, the graph lies slightly above 0.0000250%.

Comparing the words ‘professional’ and ‘liberal’ on NGram, the resulting graph shows that the word ‘liberal’ has decreased slightly in the past 200 years. Meanwhile, while ‘professional’ was less used than ‘liberal’ in the past, it has since skyrocketed and surpassed ‘liberal’ greatly. In the past, people were considered wise if they had knowledge on numerous unrelated topics, explaining why ‘liberal’ was originally used more. More recently, however, people have striven to dedicate themselves to a certain topic and become a professional in that area, leading to the increase in usage. Bucknell is devoted to providing a liberal education to its students, rather than buying into the current trend of focusing on a single topic of study.

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Here, I have created a Wordle of the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence; two dominant words shown in the Wordle are ‘Government’ and ‘powers’. Inputting these two words into NGram, ‘powers’ is shown to have been on a slight, but steady, decrease. ‘Government’, while used more often than powers, suffered a sharp decrease and then increased in recent years.

As for why the word ‘government’ is used more than ‘powers’, even while its usage is decreased, I believe it is because of the meaning of the two words. ‘Government’ has always will been, and most likely will continue to be, the main word used to describe a governing body of a state or country. ‘Powers’, on the other hand, is more of what I would call a “trend word.” This means that even if it may have been used much in the past, it will not always be a popular word. Though it has been declining steadily since 1800, the graph shows that there was a sharp decrease in usage in the mid-1960s. To me, this proves that the word ‘powers’ was at one point popular (perhaps before the 1800s), but is no longer widely used.


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