POLITICAL SENSITIVITY QUOTIENT PQ index tracks buzzwords that sweep nation

The company releases a top 20 list every month.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- Girlie-men. Flip-floppers. Liars, both President Bush and challenger John Kerry. Blue states. Red states. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." Vulgarity among politicians.
Politically charged phrases and themes such as these spread faster than mold on a ripe Florida orange in today's fast-paced, Internet-driven news cycle.
Curiosity about the phenomenon recently prompted Paul J.J. Payack, a Danville, Calif., software engineer and fiction author, to devise an algorithm that tracks the rise and fall of common words and phrases used in newspapers, TV and the Internet.
Payack releases a monthly top 20 list called the Political Sensitivity Quotient, or PQ Index. It's gotten so hot that that it might soon appear in its own ranking.
The index has aired on CNN, CBS Sunday Morning, KGO Radio and appeared in newspapers around the world since its April debut.
Last month, Reuters staffers covering the Athens Olympics asked Payack to fire up his software to determine whether journalists began using more classical Greek metaphors and allusions in their coverage after the games started. (On a single recent morning, Payack found 3,000 references to Greek history and mythology compared to virtually none a month ago.)
Very impressed
"I'm impressed with the cleverness of this," said John Horrigan, senior researcher at the Washington-based Pew Internet and American Life Project, which studies how the Internet affects people's lives. "It appears that he has a tool that measures the viral capabilities of modern, interactive communication technology.
"I've not seen anything quite like it. I'm going to bookmark it right away."
A Harvard-educated writer who studied six languages, 54-year-old Payack has held a lasting relationship with linguistics. He says he has read the New York Times every day since he was a teenager.
He combined his polyglot background with his news junkie side two years ago after he noticed the sudden and widespread use of the term "rush to war."
"I read the term on the Washington Post's site, and then I saw it appear in news story after news story -- it took on a life of its own," Payack said. "I started tracking it, and that's how this all started."
Formed company
He formed a company called The Global Language Monitor, enlisted the help of eight colleagues around the globe and tested his software for nine months before he released his first set of results in April.
The month before, he produced the "Hollyword list," which named "wardrobe malfunction" and "bootylicious" as the top two Hollywood terms most likely to become household phrases.
The company hasn't made a profit yet, but demand for new forms of research data usually comes with "the potential to make money," Payack said.