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Evidently it was quite fortuitous. Just couple of days after MTV's Video Music Awards, Oxford Dictionaries Online released its quarterly list of the new words it was adding. To the delight of the media, there was "twerk" at the top, which gave them still another occasion to link a story to Miley Cyrus's energetic high jinks.

And why not add "twerk"? It's definitely a cool word, which worked its way from New Orleans bounce music into the linguistic mainstream on the strength of its expressive phonetics, among other things. It won't linger — the names of dance styles rarely do — but we'll have a historical record of it in the section reserved for forgotten forbidden dances, along with "lambada" and "turkey trot." Now that dictionaries are online, space is unlimited; you're never going to have to ask the outdated words to give up their spots to make room for the new ones coming on.

All the dictionaries periodically release a list of their new words, most of them provocatively cute and fleeting. Chambers Dictionary announces they've got "mocktail." Merriam's counters with "man cave." Collins includes "squadoosh," an Italian-American slang word that means "zilch." And Oxford's recent list included "selfie," "fauxhawk" and the exclamations "derp!" and "squee!," not to mention the abbreviation SRSLY, as in "seriously." If you haven't picked up on all of these yet, I wouldn't worry. None of them is likely to outlive your hamster.

True, the dictionaries are also adding durable new items like "cloud computing," "systemic risk" and baseball's "walk off." (It mystifies me that it took 150 years to come up with a word for that.) But it's the ephemeral and faddish ones that generate the most arresting media headlines: "It's official! Oxford declares 'selfie' a real word!"

The dictionaries themselves disavow any official role in defining a "real word" — these are just items that we've been noticing a lot, they say. But they know perfectly well that the only reason the announcements get picked up is that people still believe that dictionaries are gatekeepers whose inclusion of a word confers approval.

There was a time when dictionaries were expected to restrict themselves to words that had reputable literary credentials. Back in 1961, Merriam-Webster set off a cultural firestorm for opening the columns of its new unabridged to parvenus like "litterbug," "wise up" and "yakking." Critics accused Merriam's of "subversion" and "sabotage," and The New York Times charged that the dictionary was accelerating the deterioration of the language.

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The Obama administration is getting assistance from outside allies also trying to sell Congress on authorizing a military strike against Syria. Among the most prominent: strong backers of Israel.

Casino magnate and top GOP contributor Sheldon Adelson surprised many recently by offering to help President Obama get a resolution passed on Syria. And Capitol Hill was blanketed this week by some 300 lobbyists with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

Israel's advocates have close ties with many lawmakers. According to the interest-group tracking website Maplight, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin is the sixth biggest recipient in Congress of campaign contributions from pro-Israel political action groups.

Like many other Democratic lawmakers who receive such funds, Durbin cites Israel in explaining his support for military action against Syria. "When it comes to the nation of Israel, our closest and best ally in the Middle East, they understand what we are trying to do with chemical weapons in Syria," Durbin said earlier this week in a Senate floor speech. "And they've made it clear through their friends in the United States and other ways, that they support it without fear of retaliation by Syria."

That's the same kind of message lawmakers have been getting in person this week from AIPAC's fleet of lobbyists. American University congressional expert James Thurber ranks AIPAC among Washington's top special interest groups. "If you look at the support for Israel by the United States, they are a key part of that," says Thurber. "They've been very successful on all the major issues related to Israel."

As a 501(c)4 organization, AIPAC cannot make campaign contributions — but it's seen as influencing many pro-Israel groups that do. (AIPAC declined a request to comment on the record for this report.)

For most lawmakers, Thurber says, loyalty to Israel and its supporters has been a given — except when it comes to a military strike against Syria. "They've voted with AIPAC, AIPAC gives them high ratings in terms of loyalty," he says, "but right now they're split, because their constituents are going in another direction."

Indeed, as AIPAC's lobbyists swarmed Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell — the third biggest beneficiary in Congress of pro-Israel contributions — went to the Senate floor to announce that the resolution the Foreign Relations panel approved last week authorizing military action against Syria did not pass muster. "So I will be voting against this resolution. A vital national security risk is clearly not at play," McConnell said, adding, "there are just too many unanswered questions about our long-term strategy in Syria."

McConnell is up for re-election next year in his home state of Kentucky. Longtime Kentucky political analyst Al Cross isn't surprised by McConnell's decision to break ranks on this issue with pro-Israel contributors. "He's a party leader who wants to remain party leader, and his party is clearly, the majority of his party is against this," says Cross, "and he faces an opponent in the primary who's against it."

Number two Senate Republican John Cornyn, who's also seeking re-election next year, has also come out against the Syria resolution.

University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer, who co-authored a book on the pro-Israel lobby's influence in Congress, says AIPAC has limited clout on Syria. "It almost always gets its way on issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict, on foreign aid to Israel, and on protecting Israel in the united nations," says Mearsheimer. "But when it comes to pushing the United States to use military force against another country because it's seen as being in Israel's interest, the lobby does not always get its way."

Even lawmakers who do agree with AIPAC on Syria say its lobbying has not influenced them. "I voted before AIPAC took a position on this," says Maryland Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin, a member of the panel that passed the Syria resolution last week, "so I have supported the resolution from the beginning."

So too have most other congressional leaders — from both parties. Still, American University's Thurber says there's a good reason why that resolution was pulled yesterday from the Senate floor. "It looks like they're not going to get the votes," says Thurber, "and so it is something, at least on this issue, that's rare, that you have all those people together, and rare that it looks like they may lose."

Which would also be a rare outcome for AIPAC's lobbyists.

Washington, D.C., Mayor Vincent Gray has vetoed a controversial "living wage" bill that would have forced large retailers such as Wal-Mart to pay a 50 percent premium on the district's $8.25 per hour minimum wage.

When the bill was approved by the city council in July, Wal-Mart said it would abandon three of the six stores it planned to build in the district, claiming the required minimum $12.50 it would have to pay was too much.

Since then Gray, a Democrat, has been mulling whether to sign the Large Retailer Accountability Act, as the bill is known. On Thursday, he ended weeks of speculation and vetoed it.

Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, a supporter of the act, said he was "disappointed" by the mayor's decision, which he said was "not good for workers."

A letter sent by Mendelson to Gray said the bill was "not a true living-wage bill, because it would raise the minimum wage only for a small fraction of the District's workforce," according to The Washington Post.

The Post quotes Wal-Mart spokesman Steven Restivo as saying the veto is "good news for D.C. residents," saying Gray chose "jobs, economic development and common sense over special interests."

He said that if the council fails to override the veto, "all stores are back on."

Other major retailers, such as Target and Home Depot, also opposed the bill.

In a statement from the National Retail Federation, spokesman David French thanked Gray "for his leadership on this important issue. With a stroke of his pen, the Mayor brought power back to D.C.'s 'Open for Business' sign."

With the current focus on Syria it's easy to miss that things are getting worse again in Iraq. Since the spring, the country has been pounded by waves of attacks on civilians and security forces by extremists with links to al-Qaida. Three car bombs in the Iraqi city of Baquoba killed 10 people Tuesday.

Iraq is one of those slow-boil crises — not as dynamic or transformational as a military coup in Egypt or a civil war in Syria. Refugees aren't creating havoc on the borders. Iraq's government doesn't seem on the verge of falling. Instead, Iraqis are stuck in a middle ground: A daily life wracked with danger but without enough upheaval to raise international alarm.

However, that could change if the bloodshed continues at current levels. U.S. troops withdrew in late 2011 but the country is still at the heart of important U.S. interests — oil, counter-terrorism and regional stability amid the ongoing friction between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Statistics kept by the Baghdad bureau of Agence France Presse show the monthly number of deaths jumping from between 200 and 300 at the start of the year to almost 900 in July and nearly 700 last month.

The count kept by the United Nations office in Iraq show higher totals with two or three times as many dying in the last couple months as were dying at the start of the year.

Last month, a U.S. State Department official said in a background briefing that suicide bombings had increased from five or 10 a month early in the year to about 30 a month now.

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