From June Thomas in Slate:
When George W. Bush attacked Saddam Hussein in a speech Wednesday, the British papers were boggled by the president's vocabulary, described by the Financial Times as "his inimitable populist argot," specifically his references to Saddam having "stiffed" the world and "crawfished" the international community.The consternation of the simultaneous translators and the newshawks is way down the list.
The Times' Washington correspondent accused the president of inventing the verb "to crawfish," which it claimed was "unknown even to slang dictionaries" and worried that he would "plunge the simultaneous translators into meltdown" when he addresses the United Nations on Sept. 12. The Independent was more resourceful?turning to Webster's for a definition of crawfishing ("to retreat from a position, to back out, to fail to stick to a statement made").
