"no-mentum" towards WOTY?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Feb 8 02:47:28 UTC 2008


 From today's NYT (A29), the first hit on this word that shows up in a
Nexis search.  This isn't to say that it really is the first
occurrence in print, or that it will have staying power, but it's
worth considering...

LH
====================================

Just a few days ago, Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly
Standard, was telling viewers on the Fox News Channel, ''I do think
it is awfully self-indulgent of Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul to even
appear on this debate when it should be a debate between Romney and
John McCain.'' Before Mr. Huckabee swept five Southern states on
Tuesday, it was hardly a minority opinion in the world of political
commentary that his was a vanity candidacy.

''This wasn't the first time I thought Huckabee was dead,'' Mr.
Barnes said in an interview Wednesday. But, he said, his analysis
seemed correct by the standards of past races. Rarely has a candidate
been able to recover as Mr. Huckabee did after coming in fourth place
in a major battleground -- Florida -- with little money and no
apparent groundswell of support.

Mr. Barnes said he believed the heavy news coverage and discussion of
the race has moved from subject to subject too fast to allow for any
one victory -- or loss -- to determine a candidate's viability.

''It used to be you'd get momentum because you could live through
many news cycles on a victory,'' he said. Now, he said, ''it's the
world of 'no-mentum.' '' (He credited his Fox colleague, Brit Hume,
for the term.)

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list