The lexicographer's labor is never finished. Language, like the republic it describes, corrupts by increments too small for any single citizen to notice, until one morning he wakes to find that self-defense means something his grandfather would not have recognized, and that a man may be murdered by an adjective. I offer the following supplement to my dictionary, compiled from the public statements of officials who, I am assured, mean every euphemism they utter.

A man who wishes to be remembered has two methods available to him. The first is to do something worth remembering. The second, far less strenuous and vastly more popular among heads of state, is to have his name engraved on things that were doing perfectly well under their previous ones. I bring this up because the news this week supplies two specimens of the second method in such close proximity that a lepidopterist would be forgiven for pinning them to the same board.