Cheney on "throes"

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:02 PM -0400 6/24/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>The latest on the lexico-political front...
>...
>"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."
>-----
>...
>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.
>

Are you sure they're *not* using it in the standard MWCD11 use?   ;-)

L