Journalistic lingo contributes so fruitfully to our everyday language, that threatens to sink into a monotone rather like one of those clicking languages in African jungles... amusing to those who listen to us, but half-heartedly sufficient for us. So many words that I never suspected, existed, have become so common now, one thinks of them like cellphones. How did we survive without them?

A lame duck minister (or PM or Prez or CMD, put any suffix catching your fancy) is an epithet one hears too often these days, logically following the discussion on Foot In The Mouth disease.  Perhaps the one who ran away with the cake was our erstwhile LD PM, Narsimha Rao whose indecisiveness was the stuff legends are made of. He had not only...

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