In a letter to the novelist Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt once wrote, “Nothing is more sickening than the continual praise of [President] Wilson’s English, of Wilson’s style; he is a true logothete, a real sophist…”

This raises two questions, maybe even more. What the hell is a logothete anyway? And has any president since Wilson even heard the word, let alone been one? We will start and end our examination with the 43rd president.

George Walker Bush is a logorrheic, true. Logorrhea runs in the family, and Bush has engaged professional logographers to control the symptoms. For a time their treatments were successful, but have lately become less so.

And so the White House began releasing lists of books full of complicated words, some of them French, which Bush was said to have read between brush-clearing sessions at the old family ranch he bought while running for president.

Still, the president’s efforts at logomachy continued to falter, and so lately he has been positioning himself subtly in front of a bookshelf when the television cameras are running. In some polls, his numbers then dropped into the twenties.

Apparently this latest ploy hadn’t made the president stink of the lamp, but merely of flop-sweat. Books in the background didn’t make Bush a logothete any more than being born in Connecticut made him a Texan.