It looks like this -- well, the red dots marking the search term may not be very visible in this screenshot.
For a decider, Bush surely doesn't use the verb decide very often. It occurs exactly once, and he puts the burden of the decision on the nation's shoulders: "Today, having come far in our historical journey, we must decide: Will we turn back, or finish well?" (2006, Paragraph 69/72)
2 comments:
Cool -- I played with that widget but it never occurred to me to check for 'decider'!
'Widget' looks obscure historically. OED suggests that it's possibly a variant of 'gadget' but that too looks obscure, an old sailor's term. Of course with a word like that, you get lots of fun speculation. In a couple minutes I found:
< which it (presumably for 'widget')
< 'window gadget'
< 'wifflow-gadget'
Etc.
I just looked up the first documented source (American Speech, 1931, p. 259) -- in an article on "American indefinite names". There are some other nice words on that list: diddledyflop, fumadiddle, hoofenpoofer, snivvie, dudelheimer [aside: sounds like pure Loriot, you know, the German humorist], and also gadget, whatsit, whoozit, . The article says that "gadget" was an importation from England and it seems to be the leading word. I really only use it for dudelheimers with some tech-appeal.
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