Is That Legal?

I don't get it. "Congential" is not, as far as I can tell, a word, yet you use it twice. Safire does not; he uses "congenital," so "congential" appears to be merely a typo. But where is the word play in "congenital liar"? "Congenital" means "acquired at birth," so Safire doesn't mean it literally, but "congenital liar" is a common metaphor for someone who lies repeatedly. Again, where is the word play?

I thought Bill was the one who lied about his genitals.

Great. Only took me ten years to get the pun.

What is "balast"? I can't figure out what that's supposed to be, either. Blast?

Ballast. That's an interesting choice of words. From the Oxford English Dictionary: "ballast: 3. That which tends to give stability in morals or politics..." How does that square with your accusation of congenital lying? Perhaps you wrote the truth without realizing it, eh?

To clariy my comment, I was not asking if you wrote the truth, but suggesting that you did. The question was rhetorical. In other words, while you would use the word ballast to characterize Cheney's comments as "roughage" I would use the same word to characterize them as lending stability and reason to the political discourse. Of course we disagree--no surprise there-- but I found it interesting that we could both use the same word to convey such a different meaning.

Shertaugh: It's the beauty of irony, I guess -- an elusive concept I've spent the better part of my adult life in search of . . . as Eric will confirm.

So did you originally intend ballast to mean "load" or "roughage"? Clearly, those two words do not mean the same thing. It just seems to me that you were so hasty to post a bad comment about Cheney that you not only had a number of misspellings that confused your readers, but you also created a metaphor that used a word that has an alternative definition that means the exact opposite of the meaning you intended to convey.