I've had this phrase running through my head since we started updating our Commencement Speeches database a few weeks ago: "If you're too big for a small job, you're too small for a big job."

Who said that? It was Katie Couric at American University last year.

Who knew that a commencement address could get stuck in your head? Well, the best of these speeches have a lot in common with a great pop song. They are simple, emotional, and pack a universal message into just a few words.

I remember reading a long time ago that the most frequent words in Madonna's lyrics were, in order, "love," "baby" and "time." A linguistics paper says the top nouns in rock music for the 20-year period ending in 2009 were "love," "time" and "way"; in pop it was "love", "baby" and "way." So there you go.

So I got curious. I put the money quotes from our Commencement Speeches database , from between 1774 and 2013, into a text-analysis tool on the Web, to see if I could pick up similar patterns. Excluding prepositions and other super-common words, the five most frequent words appearing were:

Life

Make

People

World

Yourself

Then I tried the same thing with the new speeches we've just added. There are 41 new commencement addresses in the database from the 2014 and 2015 graduation season. They come from a diverse group of speakers: astronaut Bernard Harris, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and "Mr. Immaletyoufinish" — Kanye West.

In the new group of money quotes, these are the top five less-common words:

Make

Success

Generation

Define

Human

Another notable couple of words that popped up were "text" and "technology."

These sets of words, like a poem or a song, deliver a message all by themselves.

Obviously it's hard to draw conclusions from such a small sample. But it's true that the job market for new grads has been looking up lately , so maybe that's why "success" has risen up the ranks. And maybe when talking to an always-networked Millennial, speakers are slightly more likely to address a "generation" than the solitary "yourself."

I also personally like the slightly scientific-sounding objectivity of "human" as opposed to "people." As the writer Zadie Smith told the class of 2014 at the New School: "Don't let your fellow humans be alien to you."

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