Words: Gangbusters, scheme

I recently sent an apologetic email to someone whose lecture I could not, in the end, make the time to see. I copied a second friend, just to let her know that I wasn’t going. In it I said that the semester had come on like gangbusters and I didn’t have any choice but to just try to keep up the pace.

Gangbusters. A very good word.

But in reply, both recipients asked me about the word. Gangbusters, Anne, really?

I guess I’m alone in keeping it alive.

Then, on the radio the other morning, a British journalist described the Bush administration’s scheme to bailout the failed banks. I was taken aback by the word before remembering that scheme does not have such a firmly negative connotation in England as it does here.

Nonetheless, I suspect I’m right to have detected the slightest little sneer in the American journalist’s voice when she picked the story back up, saying that yes, many Americans , too, had voiced concerns about the scheme.

Scheme. Another good one.