Opinion: Adding (or not) to the language

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‘Big Challenges, Real Solutions.’

That’s the new slogan Hillary Clinton unveiled earlier this week as she began making the rounds in Iowa, looking to win over wavering Democrats as Thursday’s caucuses approach.

Clinton may well pull off a victory -- she appears to have staunched the surge for Barack Obama that some polls detected earlier in the month in Iowa (check out these new results). Regardless, we predict a short shelf life for her new catch phrase; we could be wrong, but its prospects for joining the likes of ‘New Deal’ and ‘New Frontier’ in the permanent political lexicon seem slim.

Mitt Romney, meanwhile, may have made linguistic history, regardless of the outcome of his Republican presidential bid.

Romney, to his chagrin, was the subject of what has become widely termed an ‘anti-endorsement’ -- a scathing editorial in New Hampshire’s liberal Concord Monitor that attacked him as a phony. The phrase was recycled when the state’ s biggest newspaper, the Manchester Union, followed suit with a negative editorial targeting him.

Anti-endorsement ... now that’s a label we can envision becoming a well-used part of the political vocabulary.

-- Don Frederick