Donald Trump Is Increasing Our Vocabulary

And he's not the only politician who has us Googling words
By Brownie Marie,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 3, 2015 10:24 AM CDT
Donald Trump Is Increasing Our Vocabulary
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump answers questions from reporters at the National Federation of Republican Assemblies on Saturday, Aug. 29, 2015, in Nashville, Tenn.   (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

Donald Trump's status as the GOP frontrunner has apparently been a boon for Merriam-Webster. Politico takes a quirky look at what the online dictionary says have been spikes in word lookups tied to the 2016 candidates, with a Merriam-Webster associate editor telling the site that "Trump has brought up the motherlode of lookups." The Politico piece isn't long on examples, but here's one: The mogul's comments on immigrants led Sen. Lindsey Graham to say, "We have to reject this demagoguery"; Rick Perry called Trump's words "a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense."

But the word-search jump apparently didn't occur until July 17, the day after Trump tweeted: ".@GovernorPerry just gave a pollster quote on me. He doesn't understand what the word demagoguery means." (If you don't, here it is.) Other politically inspired searches include the phrase "Hobson's choice"—used in a Fox News op-ed in reference to Hillary Clinton having to turn over her email server. Some of her recently revealed emails also led to a spike in searches for the word "louche," a word adviser Sid Blumenthal used to describe John Boehner. (More Donald Trump 2016 stories.)

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