WE'VE gone on a bit about the distinction between different kinds of mistakes a politician can make speaking. This is probably worth a bit of elaboration in the wake of Hillary Clinton's campaign announcing that she " misspoke " about her harrowing landing under sniper fire in Bosnia, an event that appears to have been, in videotaped fact, as phsyically dangerous as a taping of Prairie Home Companion . Footage showed that Mrs Clinton calmly listened to a poem being read by an eight-year-old girl on that terrifying Bosnian tarmac.

A "typo" is a mere garbling, like saying "Canadia" when you've just said the word "Canadian" several times and the fake country name slips out. Probably every person alive makes a handful of such production errors in speech every day. We produce several thousand words a day, and a few are bound to go wrong, even for careful speakers. There is no use focusing on these things at all.

But we also have the lovely word "thinko": a mistake that betrays a flawed or nonexistent understanding of a topic being discussed. When George Bush referred to the citizens of Greece as "Grecians", we can legitimately worry: has he heard so little of the Greeks, ancient or modern, in his lifetime that he doesn't know the English name for them? Or was he just tired, perhaps producing a typo?

Indeed, we could probably separate thinkos into two kinds: one of which involves not knowing enough about something (Bush and the Greeks), and another of which involves "knowing" wrong things. (Mark Twain: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.") Perhaps "knowing wrong things, and spouting them" could, in honor of the over-optimistic architects of the Iraq war, be called a Wolfowitz-o or a Chalabi-o. Unfortunately, few of the relevant names lend themselves comfortably to this coinage. Feith-o, anyone?

But it appears now we need a new category beyond typos and thinkos, since Mrs Clinton has gone so far as to invent a new kind of speech stumble. So what would we call a misstatement that involves embellishing your record with wholly invented stories of personal bravery, all the while being so foolish as not to remember that camera crews taped the incident you described, and then repeating and further embellishing the story; and then when confronted with video evidence, insulting voters' basic intelligence by insisting you produced a mere "typo" or perhaps a very mild "thinko", when really you've just plain lied to their faces? Readers are invited to name this new kind of linguistic slip-up.

(Photo credit: AP)