General Conference Word Frequencies

With general conference coming up for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I though I'd do some text analysis of past conferences (because that's apparently how I think).  I'll put the code [python] up on github for anyone who wants to replicate the results for themselves - feel free to ask for help if you can't figure out how to get all the pegs to line up.

So, a pretty straightforward question is "What do they talk about the most at General Conference?" And here is the straight answer I got for such a narrowly scoped question: the top 10 words across all sessions of General Conference dating back to April 1971.:

1. the
2. of
3. and
4. to
5. in
6. a
7. that
8. i
9. is
10. we

Somewhat uninspiring.  Of course we need to have a baseline to compare against, because the question "What do they talk about" needs to have some context: What do they say at General Conference more frequently than is said in the English language?  Several word frequency lists are maintained here and there on the internet (there's even a massive one at this random school.)  Since I'm only looking at the most frequent words, I used this one because it was easy to hack for this project.  One robust way to go about implementing this would be to use an adaptation of TF-IDF vectors - but this is a weeknight hack, so instead I will be content with the following question: of the 1000 most common words in General Conference, which are not in the 1000 most common English words?  I'll rank them in order of their frequency in General Conference.  Here it is:

1. lord
2. christ
3. jesus
4. world
5. unto
6. gospel
7. priesthood
8. ye
9. years
10. prophet

Apparently, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints talks about Jesus Christ (whom they call Lord, and do so a lot).  Who knew?

For the curious, the next 40 results are at the end of the post.  Since this analysis was pretty basic, in my next post (which might be tonight if I can't find something better to do), I'll use some topic modeling to get a better grip on the question "What do they talk about at General Conference?"

11. lives
12. d
13. holy
14. joseph
15. eternal
16. words
17. savior
18. smith
19. temple
20. c
21. testimony
22. women
23. saints
24. taught
25. sisters
26. thou
27. heaven
28. pray
29. mormon
30. blessings
31. heavenly
32. parents
33. spiritual
34. mission
35. brethren
36. prayer
37. thy
38. teach
39. scriptures
40. kingdom
41. amen
42. commandments
43. prophets
44. hearts
45. families
46. ghost
47. latterday
48. conference
49. whom
50. witness