Partly cloudy

Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute has given me a new vocabulary word. In his column Wednesday, he describes a "tag cloud" as a program that can make it easy to see how often words or phrases emerge in speeches, for example. On this Web site, you can look at the most commonly used words in Bush's speech and compare it with presidential speeches stretching back to 1776.

"The tag cloud shows that last night, President Bush's most frequently used words were "Iraq," "terrorist," "economy" and "freedom."

George Washington's 1790 State of the Union speech emphasized the words "deliberations," "opinion," "blessings" and "Constitution." By 1791, he added the words "Indians" and "debt" to his vernacular.

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson's tag cloud is dominated by the word "debt."

In 1846, James Polk was stuck on the word "Mexico."

I have a feeling if you did one of these tag clouds on the Valley's teenage language, the big word in all caps will be LIKE. The kids who hang out at our house, like, can't say two words without, like, putting "like" in the sentence. Even the foreign students pick it up as a space filler similar to "um."