~/projects/general-conference/phrases
How phrases spread
A phrase is born, someone says it first, and then it either catches on or it does not. This study finds the phrases that emerged in the corpus, traces who adopted them and how fast, by calling and by year, and watches old phrases revive and one term replace another.
What stands out
- The sharpest coinage is “covenant path”. First said in 2007 by Elaine S. Dalton, it emerged in 2013 and appeared 171.8 times more often in the fifteen years after than in the thirty before; 69 speakers have used it in 126 talks.
- Fast phrases reach half their speakers in 5 years. “social media” did; “welfare program” took 30.
- Old phrases come back. “ministering” has been in the corpus since 1852 and is used 4.2 times more often in the last ten years than in the thirty before, peaking in 2018.
- Terms get replaced. “moral agency” overtook “free agency” in 1990; “latter day saint” overtook “mormon” in 1900; “ministering” overtook “home teaching” in 1965; “family history” overtook “genealogy” in 1931.
- Adoption usually runs from the top. For most coinages the First Presidency or the Twelve use a phrase before the Seventy and the auxiliaries; the grid under each phrase shows the exceptions, where an auxiliary leader said it first.
Loading the study…
Model card
- Data
- 10,686 talks of 100 words or more with a known year, from the General Conference corpus (1839–2026). Prose paragraphs only.
- Candidates
- Two- and three-word phrases after masking names, years, magazine titles and bibliographic citations, used in at least 25 talks by at least 8 speakers, with no citation markers, hymn numbers or fragments of two letters. A watch list of phrases of known interest is always included.
- Emergence
- The first year a phrase is used by two or more speakers with at most two uses before it, provided it then recurs in at least four of the following ten years.
- Burst and revival
- Burst: the share of talks using the phrase in the fifteen years from emergence divided by its share in the thirty years before, with at least 200 talks in that window and a floor of one earlier use. Revival: the share in the last ten years divided by the share in the thirty years before that. Coinages need a burst of 8 or more; revivals a factor of 3 or more and ten speakers in the last decade.
- Adoption
- Adopters are speakers in order of first use. Years to half the speakers counts from emergence to the first use by the median adopter. Calling is the calling held when speaking, from the leadership database where the source prints only a title.
- Known failure modes
- A phrase can emerge because the source changed rather than the language: 1942 and 1971 are source boundaries in the conference corpus, and OCR text splits words. Shares in early decades rest on few talks. A watch-list phrase with no emergence year has been in use since the corpus began.
Methods and data for the corpus as a whole.