Dictionaries in the News

Today I decided to add a "dictionaries in the news" element to my blogorama...How much do they come up? How are they used? Well, there's this gem from the NYTimes on Hillary Clinton's expression, a "bird-dog minute," courtesy of ever lexically dependable William Safire. If it isn't a southernism (bird-dog as verb appears first in a Galveston newspaper in the even more dependable OED), than it's certainly a westernism and something that should suggest that she is conversant with the practices of the outdoor sport.

And then, finally, I've been musing about "misunderestimate." It seems to have become a way to poke fun at Republican campaigners, but I fear that its constant use by CNN newsheads will lend it some credibility. What has been Bush's lexical legacy? How have his malapropisms poisoned our pool of words? In one hundred years, will Olympic high jumpers misunderestimage the height of the pole? And what would that mean anyway? Can one underestimate accurately to begin with? Just some philological thoughts...