Word: gotcha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is a serious column.Fair warning, because you’ll be waiting for the payoff, the gotcha moment, the just-kidding punch line, and it’s not going to arrive.Last Saturday, I was a civilian; at far remove from the Yale Bowl press box, I cheered wildly for every Bulldogs stumble, every incompletion, every three-and-out. Virtually everything that could go wrong for the Elis did, and as a Harvard fan who loves to point and laugh and yell in the raucous environment of a near-full arena, I reveled in it. Last Sunday, I asked...
...words. But does the technique shed light on the candidates or does it require them to spend time providing context for their previous statements, crowding out more meaningful queries? It was Barack Obama's turn on Nov. 11; the previous week, Fred Thompson's. The Russert ratio of gotcha to substance questions...
...RATIO OF GOTCHA TO SUBSTANCE...
...While Democrats fully intend to capture every embarrassing vote in an array of 30-second TV spots ahead of the 2008 elections, they insist that none of the legislation they are passing - much of it with bipartisan support - is simply symbolic gotcha bills meant to paint Bush into a corner and score political points. As one senior Senate aide remarked: "This is not Terry Schiavo, flag burning and gay marriage." That may or may not be true, but the mud that flies should be just as ugly...
WikiScanner is a jolly little game of Internet gotcha, but it's really about something more: a growing popular irritation with the Internet in general. The Net has anarchy in its DNA; it's always been about anonymity, playing with your own identity and messing with other people's heads. The idea, such as it was, seems to have been that the Internet would free us of the burden of our public identities so we could be our true, authentic selves online. Except it turns out--who could've seen this coming?--that our true, authentic selves aren't that...