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.
- An unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person; a scoundrel or rascal.
- One who is playfully mischievous; a scamp.
- A wandering beggar; a vagrant.
- A vicious and solitary animal, especially an elephant that has separated itself from its herd.
- An organism, especially a plant, that shows an undesirable variation from a standard.
adj.
- Vicious and solitary. Used of an animal, especially an elephant.
- Large, destructive, and anomalous or unpredictable: a rogue wave; a rogue tornado.
- 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.
- To defraud.
- 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.