Changing terminology in U.S. presidential inaugural speeches

The figure below shows the frequency of certain types of words in inaugural speeches of U.S. presidents. The three types showed are words beginning with the string “elect”, words beginning with “repub” and words beginning with “democ”. Around the middle of the 20th century the “elect” and “repub” types were largely abandoned while the “democ” type became more prominent.

The Data was extracted from the texts of the speeches as found on the website of the “UCSB presidency project” using an R script.

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