Mitt Romney: The Ryan budget is a marvelous work and a wonder

A few weeks ago, President Obama made fun of Mitt Romney for describing Paul Ryan's budget as "marvelous" by saying,

Marvelous is a word you don't often hear when it comes to describing a budget. It's a word that you don't often hear generally.

Which is true, generally, unless you're a Mormon.

Mormons love the word "marvelous." It was one of Joseph Smith's favorite words. He used it 50 times in the book of Mormon, compared to the 24 times it is found in the King James Version of the Bible. And since the Bible is nearly five times as big as the Book of Mormon, the Book of Mormon is about ten times as "marvelous" as the Bible.

Here's a table to summarize the marvelousness of these two marvelous books.

	Bible	Book of Mormon
Marvelous	24	50
number of verses	31,102	6553
Occurrences per 10,000 verses	7.7	76.3

But one of the phrases that Joseph Smith loved the most was "a marvelous work and a wonder." He used it to describe his own work, the Book of Mormon, and Mormons have used it as a code name for their sacred text ever since.

Here is how the phrase is used in Mitt Romney's third favorite book. (His favorite book is either Battlefield Earth or the Bible.)

And the Lord will set his hand again the second time to restore his people from their lost and fallen state. Wherefore, he will proceed to do a marvelous work and a wonder among the children of men. 2 Nephi 25:17

Therefore, I will proceed to do a marvelous work among this people, yea, a marvelous work and a wonder, for the wisdom of their wise and learned shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent shall be hid.2 Nephi 27:26

So when Romney called the Ryan budget "marvelous," he was using a word that is often heard in Mormondom. I suspect that if Romney was fully unzipped, he would say it is "a marvelous work and a wonder" just like the Book of Mormon.