Cheney on "throes"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

The latest on the lexico-political front...

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http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/06/23/cheney.interview/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday defended his
recent comment that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes,"
insisting that progress being made in setting up a new Iraqi government
and establishing democracy there will indeed end the violence --
eventually.

However, in an exclusive interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Cheney said he
thinks there still will be "a lot of bloodshed" in the coming months, as
the insurgents try to stop the move toward democracy in Iraq.

"If you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a
violent period, the throes of a revolution," he said. "The point would be
that the conflict will be intense, but it's intense because the terrorists
understand that if we're successful at accomplishing our objective --
standing up a democracy in Iraq -- that that's a huge defeat for them."
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Cheney's reliance on the dictionary definition of "throes" (conveniently
ignoring the implications of the word "last" in the collocation "last
throes") is reminiscent of Rumsfeld breaking out the OED for "slog":
<http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3339857/>.

Also, speaking of dictionaries, I can't find this transitive use of "stand
up" ("standing up a democracy in Iraq") in the OED or elsewhere. (MWCD11
only gives one definition for transitive "stand up": "to fail to keep an
appointment with".) But apparently this is common usage in the Bush
administration, usually with "a (new) government" as the object of the
verb.

See: <http://www.google.com/search?q=site:whitehouse.gov+standing-up>


--Ben Zimmer