Eric Cantor has earned his own new word.
Cantor has largely been pushed out of the headlines today thanks to NY-26 and Paul Ryan, but if you weren't on site yesterday and missed what he had to say, there's still one diary left on the Rec List to fill you in.
Cantor said -- Cantor really said -- this:
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Monday that if Congress passes an emergency spending bill to help Missouri’s tornado victims, the extra money will have to be cut from somewhere else.
“If there is support for a supplemental, it would be accompanied by support for having pay-fors to that supplemental,” Mr. Cantor, Virginia Republican, told reporters at the Capitol. The term “pay-fors” is used by lawmakers to signal cuts or tax increases used to pay for new spending.
(Hint: Cantor was not contemplating tax increases.)
I think that Cantor has earned a special honor here, one that has notably been awarded to Rick Santorum: his own neologism, or "new word."
The problem, of course, is that "cantor" is a common noun, which so far as I can tell is most commonly identified with a role in Jewish (and other) religious services. This may be why Cantor has been so cocky: he's realized that we can't just turn "cantor" into a derogatory term the way that Dan Savage did with "santorum." He'd scream anti-Semitism -- and would probably be taken seriously.
It took me a while, but I've found a way around that.
We won't come up with a new noun meaning for "cantor" to match the noun "santorum." Instead, we'll come up with a new verb: "ericant."
Someone who ericants -- who has ericanted for years, who can't stop ericanting, who lives to ericant -- is an "ericantor."
Following Savage's protocol, we have to have a contest to decide on the precise new definition.
I think that the general subject area is pretty clear: someone who plays politics with disaster victims by trying to leverage their misery into political advantage. (Possible sample usage: "Rather than unite the country, George W. Bush decided to ericant the 9/11 tragedy into a campaign to invade Iraq.") Then again, this lacks the "hostage-holding" aspect of Cantor's statement, so maybe we can do better than this. The collective creativity of people here can no doubt do a better job of finding the perfect frothy definition than I can on my own. So I leave it to you: how do we define "ericant"? And how soon can we get this term into the dictionary?