(From the Activist Ammunition section in Volume 20, No. 15 of the Liberator Online. Subscribe here!) 
Libertarian journalist James Bovard — author of a dozen outstanding and eye-opening books including Lost Rights, The Bush Betrayal, and most recently Attention Deficit Democracy — has done Americans yet another service.
In an editorial for USA Today Bovard put together a short dictionary of "Washingtonese" — the slippery lingo that politicians, bureaucrats and other such nefarious critters use to hide what they really mean.
Or, as Bovard puts it, the government's "nebulous nomenclature deters citizens from recognizing exactly how well their elected leaders serve them."
Here's a sampling:
- Historic — different than last week
- Unprecedented — different than last month
- Emergency — the gift that keeps giving
- Truth — whatever people will swallow
- Legacy — any political boast that survives more than three 24-hour news cycles
- Handout — a government benefit received primarily by the supporters of the other party
- Mandate — whatever a winning politician can get away with
- Honorable — any public figure who has not yet been indicted
- Bill of Rights — (archaic) political invocation popular in 1790s
- Fair play — any process in which politicians or bureaucrats pick winners and losers
- Rule of Law — the latest edicts from a deputy assistant Labor Secretary or deputy assistant HUD Secretary
- Patriotic — any appeal that keeps people paying and obeying
- Waste — federal spending that fails to generate laudatory headlines, votes or campaign contributions
- Freedom — whatever rulers have not yet benevolently prohibited
- Election — when voters are permitted to freely consent to one of the two aspiring despots offered by the major parties
- Cynic — anyone who expresses doubt about the latest bipartisan agreement to gradually eliminate the federal budget deficit over the next 117 years
- Anarchist — anyone who advocates across-the-board spending cuts of more than 3.63%
- Scurrilous — anyone who mentions previous federal failures when the president proposes glorious new programs
For much more Bovardian wit and wisdom, see his USA Today article.