Presumably the programmer or others on the team are paying attention to typos, and is writing test cases for every case to prove that the code works and that it continues to do so.   Mmmmmm...?

No matter how you did it, there will always be someone else out there who will not only say that you did it “wrong,” but will also insist that the team should spend its time re-writing code that works.   (A practice that Warren Buffett refers to as “sucking your thumb.”)

On the one hand, if you truly do have “choose this word if that word appears,” as in this case, some sort of loop-based, “run through this list,” algorithm makes good sense ... and I briefly suggested one.   But on the other hand, sometimes the latest request (that cannot be denied) from The Marketing Department throws a monkey-wrench ... an exception to the rule, any slight twist that makes one case a little different from all the rest ... that can make “too-clever” logic turn into a quagmire.   And you can’t anticipate (Marketers are from Jupiter ...) what they might come up with someday, when you write the original version.   Sometimes, a coding style that is, “frankly, butt-ugly,” wins because it is more maintainable.

To touch on “maintainability” once more:   what if the third case, and only the third one, for some reason had to be different from the rest?   How much of the existing, tested code would have to be changed?   How many of the other, already known-to-be working cases would be impacted?   How much of that block of source-code would have to be touched, whether-or-not it had to do “with case number three?”   If you were too-clever, the answer would be, “all of them, all of it,” because you wrote the code in such a way that the handling for all of the cases was coupled together.   Because the code “cleverly” reduces all of the cases into one, it “cleverly” treats all cases in the same way, but, in so doing, it cannot treat any of them in even a slightly different way.

“Right or wrong?”   “Better or worse?”   Well, it depends.™   It’s not entirely a matter of “principles.”   You do the best you can, and then the men from Jupiter come along to screw it all up ...