CHANGE: THE EMPTY WORD

An opinion piece by Timothy Noah:
It's hard to think of a more meaningless political watchword than "change," but "change" is what the presidential candidates are promising … A LexisNexis database search tells the story. The phrases "change agent" and "candidate of change" turned up in news sources 50 and 70 times, respectively, in 1988. By 1992, they turned up 483 and 557 times. A cliché was born. A similar search for 2008 shows the phrases turning up 217 and 300 times -- and that's only two weeks into the year. On an annualized basis, that's 5,642 and 7,800 times, respectively.

[LA Times]

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