"Scary," Appropriately

No doubt six or seven times a year, somebody uses the word in a way that plucks it from hyperventilated-speech land and returns it to the land of decorum. This from a piece running in tomorrow's New York Times, currently titled on its website as "Journalists Said to Figure in Strategy in Leak Case," by Eric Lichtblau.

The prospect of another legal battle over access to reporters' records "could be worse for the media" than the Miller showdown, said Lucy Dalglish, head of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "You now have a situation where you have a government investigation hung completely on testimony from journalists, with journalists turned into witnesses, and that is a scary notion."