BlairSpeak

Here are the ten most frequent words Tony Blair used in interviews with the media at the start of the Iraq war compared with the top ten in the British National Corpus (BNC) sample.

	Adjectives		Nouns		Verbs
	Blair	BNC	Blair	BNC	Blair	BNC
1	economic	new	people	time	say	say
2	fair	good	inspectors	people	think	know
3	nuclear	old	countries	way	make	get
4	true	different	Iraq	year	know	go
5	difficult	local	weapons	government	try	see
6	wrong	small	resolution	day	come	make
7	Iraqi	great	issue	man	mean	think
8	united	social	time	world	happen	take
9	clear	important	world	work	go	come
10	important	national	UN	life	take	use

· more verbs like think and mean (often called personal verbs, as they express personal views), less like use

The pronouns I/she/they/etc are often a clue to how a person’s mind works. In the BNC compared to BlairSpeak, Tony Blair is using proportionately more first person (I/we) forms and less third person (he/she/it/they) forms than the BNC average. It was said that Charles de Gaulle did not use the first person je very often in speeches because whenever he talked about La France, he actually meant himself, in the tradition of Louis XIV’s L’état c’est moi (The state is me). Tony Blair’s speech sounds more egocentric than the BNC average. To be charitable, this might tell us something about the differences between the type of English used in interviews and the average English of the BNC. Or it might indeed be that Tony Blair is basically interested in talking about himself.

· I’m sorry, Jeremy, I'm not allowing you to get away with that, that is completely wrong.

· I mean let's not be absurdly naïve about this – I'm sorry, what Hans Blix has said is that the Iraqis are not cooperating properly.

· I'm sorry, it is absolutely clear what has been happening over the past few months

· If that is breached and the inspectors say, no I'm sorry we can't do our job and in those circumstances …

All these are apologising for contradicting somebody by asserting one’s own opinion, i.e. not an apology at all – equivalent to the deadly use of with respect for contradiction.