“Fracking” rhymes with hacking, and is not a friendly term. Other unpleasant words which begin with “F” include fracture, frenzied, frustrate and more. The f-word at issue here, obviously not invented by a public relations firm, refers to a technical and also extremely important method of mining natural gas and oil.

“Capitalism With A Human Face” has been a term commonly used for more than a decade and a half, inspired in part by a book of that title by Samuel Brittan, influential journalist of the London “Financial Times.”

“The corn is as high as an elephant's eye,” a signature line from the musical “Oklahoma,” comes to mind concerning the importance of the Iowa caucuses for Republicans. The just concluded exercise has winnowed the crowded field of presidential candidates in that party, while underscoring the distinctive dynamics of standard bearer selection in that party.

'Nattering nabobs of negativism,' is probably the most enduring of the many alliterative declarations of Spiro Agnew, Vice President in the Nixon administration until he was forced to resign due to corruption. This particular phrase, penned by Nixon speechwriter William Safire, was designed to put down media people who emphasize bad news over good.

This Christmas season, devoted to charity and peace, is also the anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, the largest land battle in the history of the United States. The U.S. military remains engaged in Afghanistan, and involved elsewhere on the globe even with withdrawal from Iraq. Do lessons of World War II apply? Absolutely.

The sudden death of North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il adds even more uncertainty to the tense and unpredictable surviving totalitarian state.

'Fog in channel, Continent cut off,' is a very old British joke about an alleged newspaper headline regarding weather over the waterway separating them from Europe. Even a brief visit to the British Isles can readily confirm, sometimes in startling manner, the sense of distance from the European continent among the population.

“A riddle, wrapped in an enigma, inside a mystery” is how Winston Churchill described Soviet Russia. He was speaking in October 1939, right after World War II commenced in Europe, but his words have direct importance for current developments.

We have to protect our own interests, not the other country's,” said Pakistan Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, testifying before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. She was discussing the inadvertent killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers by NATO helicopters.

The CNN-sponsored televised debate among Republican presidential contenders was revealing mainly of America's current preoccupation with domestic, not international, considerations, despite fleeting and generally negative references to the behavior of other nations.