How do I skip over multiple words in a file?

[Paul Watson]

On 2010-11-11 08:07, chad wrote:
> Let's say that I have an article. What I want to do is read in this
> file and have the program skip over ever instance of the words "the",
> "and",  "or", and "but". What would be the general strategy for
> attacking a problem like this?

I realize that you may need or want to do this in Python.  This would be 
trivial in an awk script.