Mary in Alexandria, Virginia, wonders when words like senior and senior citizen came to mean “elderly.” Senior comes from Latin senex, “old,” the source also of Senate and senile. In the 1930s, a politician helped popularize...
It’s hard enough to get a new word into the dictionary. But what happens when lawmakers get involved? New Jersey legislators passed a resolution as part of an anti-bullying campaign urging dictionary companies to adopt the word upstander. It...
Plenty of people write to dictionary editors asking for words to be added. It almost never works. But what if politicians make a special request? To urge adoption of the term upstander, as in “the opposite of bystander,” to honor those...
Gramm-standing n.— «Hutchison’s knack for bringing home dollars as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee recalls the priorities of three Texas predecessors: Lyndon Johnson, Lloyd Bentsen and Gramm. And like Gramm, Hutchison has...
marble fever n.— «But for all the learning there is to do on Smith Hill, presumed Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed cautioned the newcomers to avoid so-called “marble fever”—a term for legislators “who get up here and forget about the...
Tomnibus n.— «A product of Democratic frustration with the tactics of Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican and physician who has become the Dr. No of the Senate, the Tomnibus is a $10 billion collection of Coburn-blocked measures...