Replace all the occurrences of specific words

Question

Suppose that I have the following sentence:

bean likes to sell his beans

and I want to replace all occurrences of specific words with other

Answer 1

I know its been a long time but Does this look much more elegant? :

reduce(lambda x,y : re.sub('\\b('+y[0]+')\\b',y[1],x) ,[("bean","robert"),("beans","cars")],"bean likes to sell his beans")