by WonkoKevin

Here at Wonkosphere we expect and are not particularly concerned when politicians stretch the truth a bit in the name of framing.  Heck, even a blatant lie here and there are good for business in the world of buzz.  But when a candidate misspeaks about communication theory, we here at Wonkosphere have stand up and say “No!  You shall not besmirch informatics!”

Amidst the buzz of Clinton’s Adventure in Bosnia, she replied defending her error: “I say a lot of things–millions of words a day…”  As Shrimp and Grits readily has pointed out, she would have to speak 11.6 words per second in order to hit one million (not even millions in the plural) a day.  Speaking with no breath you can do maybe 3 words a second, so this just isn’t feasible. 

What’s a more reasonable estimate though?  In my and WonkoSteve’s research we invented the unit of a Gronn, which is the amount of paper generated by transcribing everything that a working person utters in a 5 day work week.  Gronn is after Peter Gronn, who published a study many years ago concerning his analysis of moment-by-moment utterances of a school principal.  A Gronn turns out to be 300 pages of text, or 75 pages a day.  If we assume 500 words per page, that turns out to be 37,500 words per day.  Let’s give Clinton the benefit of the doubt and say she utters 75,000 words per day, which would be a real tiring day indeed.  At that rate, she would need almost a fortnight, two weeks, to utter a million words. 

So the corrected quote should be “I say a lot of things — about 37,500 of words a day — so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement.”

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 9:47 am and is filed under Humor, Clinton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.