The Scrapbook is revising its opinion of “word clouds,” which we have heretofore mocked. That’s because we were so entertained by the ones produced in Quinnipiac University’s latest national poll. Besides the usual questions about preferences for the 2016 candidates, voting intentions, and so forth, the pollsters also asked their sample of 1,563 respondents, “What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of Hillary Clinton?”
You can see the results depicted in the word cloud we’ve reproduced here. The more often a word comes up, the larger it appears in the Quinnipiac graphic. Leading the list—the first word on the lips of 178 respondents (or more than 11 percent of those polled)—is “liar.” Following closely behind is “dishonest” (from 123 people), “untrustworthy” (93), “experience” (82), “strong” (59), “Bill” (56), “woman” (47), “smart” (31), “crook” (21), “untruthful” (19), “criminal” (18), “deceitful” (18), and quite a few more, not very many of them complimentary.
The same word-association question was asked about Donald Trump and Jeb Bush. The words respondents blurted out for Jeb are mostly anodyne, though not unrevealing: “Bush” (136), “family” (70), “honest” (53), “weak” (45), “brother” (41), “dynasty” (40), and so on.
The Trump results, as you might imagine, are almost as entertaining as Hillary’s. His greatest hits: “arrogant” (58), “blowhard” (38), “idiot” (35), “businessman” (34), “clown” (34), “honest” (30), “ego” (29), “money” (29), “outspoken” (28), “crazy” (26), “rich” (26), “showman” (23), “strong” (20), “a—hole” (18), “joke” (16), “loud” (16), “leader” (15), “pompous” (15), “bombastic” (13), “egomaniac” (13), “loudmouth” (13), etc. Ironically, given Trump’s shtick on winners and losers, and his preference for the former, the word at the bottom of his list is “winner,” suggested by just five people out of
those polled.
