Tag Archives: rogue

Going rogue?

I wasn’t quite sure what the title of Sarah Palin’s new book meant, so I looked it up in the American Heritage Dictionary (via Dictionary.com):

rogue
n.

  1. An unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person; a scoundrel or rascal.
  2. One who is playfully mischievous; a scamp.
  3. A wandering beggar; a vagrant.
  4. A vicious and solitary animal, especially an elephant that has separated itself from its herd.
  5. An organism, especially a plant, that shows an undesirable variation from a standard.

adj.

  1. Vicious and solitary. Used of an animal, especially an elephant.
  2. Large, destructive, and anomalous or unpredictable: a rogue wave; a rogue tornado.
  3. Operating outside normal or desirable controls: “How could a single rogue trader bring down an otherwise profitable and well-regarded institution?” (Saul Hansell).

v. rogued, rogu·ing, rogues

v. tr.

  1. To defraud.
  2. To remove (diseased or abnormal specimens) from a group of plants of the same variety.

v. intr.
To remove diseased or abnormal plants.

[Origin unknown.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Hmmm…. None of these definitions sound very flattering, do they? I wonder if she came up with that title herself, or if someone else suggested it just to be funny. Just for fun, I checked the thesaurus to see if it was a synonym for “maverick.” Nope.