Wow, guess not everyone had/is having a good Sunday, let me see if I can change that...
Similar to the JavaScript unttld linked to and using the CSS info the wonderful Vaska helpfully pointed out, incorporate the following: -
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd'>
<html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xml:lang='en' lang='en'>
<head>
<title>First word selector example</title>
<style media='screen' type='text/css'><!--
    #menu ul li a { color: blue; }
    #menu ul li a strong { color: grey; }
--></style>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.js'></script>
<script type='text/javascript'><!--
$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#menu ul li a').each(function(){
        var language = $(this);
        language.html( language.text().replace(/(^w+)/,'<strong>$1</strong>') );
        });
    });
--></script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>First word selector</h1>
<div id='menu'>
<ul>
    <li><a href='a.html'>First Second</a></li>
    <li><a href='b.html'>English Icelandic</a></li>
    <li><a href='c.html'>Annoyed Irritable Calm Docile</a></li>
    <li><a href='d.html'>Obama or McCain?</a> Well, I'd vote for the <em>grey</em> and <em>bold</em> one ;-P</li>
    </ul>
    </div>
<p>...see what I did there?</p>
</body>
</html>
Works a treat, requires jQuery (link from your own file if you want) and you can do pretty much anything with the first word.
Download the above
Peace and love.