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bulldog. (noun) A man of relentless, savage disposition. In a news article about the race for the Democratic Party's nomination for governor, the New York Times described the challenger, Nassau County Executive Thomas R. Suozzi, as having “bulldog style.” The relentlessness need not be coupled with savagery to be bulldoggish. Richard A. Clarke, the counterterrorism advisor in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations was described this way by his colleague, Anthony Lake: “He is a bulldog of a bureaucrat: notorious among his colleagues for utter devotion to those he works for, fierce loyalty and support toward those who work for him and a bluntness toward those at his level that has not earned him universal affection.”
Sometimes people are compared to bulldogs because they share the kind of jowled look of that breed (see adjectival form below). Winston Churchill, Great Britain 's Prime Minister during World War II, was nicknamed “bulldog.” This was based on both his looks and his temperament—at least as it was visible in the public sphere. |
1. Brewer, E. Cobham. 2000. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 1898. Bartlby.com. Accessed Sep 5 2001 from http:// www.bartleby.com/ 81/2642.htm 2. Healy, Patrick D. 2006. Suozzi Takes Jabs at Spitzer in Governor's Race. New York Times, Jan 14, B1.
3. Marquis, Christopher, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg. 2004. Threats and Responses: The Terrorism Expert; 'Go-to Guy' Sheds Bureaucrat's Anonymity. New York Times, Mar 24, 15.
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bulldog. (media) The early edition of a newspaper. In identifying the insider's lingo of the mainstream media, William Safire tells us that the early edition is the bulldog. Laura Lippman, journalist turned mystery novelist, uses the term to describe the “early Sunday edition” that comes out on Saturday. I read somewhere that it's the bulldog because it drives the other editions off the street. |
bulldog. (adjective) Squat and jowled. In her neo-feminist novel Scandalous Again, Christina Dodd describes the Duke of Magnus as a “bluff, red-cheeked bulldog of an Englishman.”
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4. Safire, William. 2006. Blargon. New York Times Magazine, Feb 19, 32. 5. Lippman, Laura. 1997. Baltimore Blues: A Tess Monaghan Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 113. 6. Dodd, Christina. 2003. Scandalous Again. New York: Avon Books, 1. 7. Haber, Tom Burns. 1965. Canine Terms Applied to Human Beings and Human Events: Part Ii. American Speech 40 (4): 251. |
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| About the illustrations: Figure 1 depicts your basic bulldog.
Figure 2 is the classic visage of Winston Churchill. Figures 3, 4, 5, and 7 are chosen to illustrate the entries. All five are © 2008 Jupiterimages Corporation. Figure 6 is an actual bulldog clip. Photograph by Richard Wheeler (Zephyris) 2007. Permission granted under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. |
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| see also: pit bull; dogged; bulldog ants cf: dog (male); hound; mad dog |
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Perhaps the reporter was inspired by Souzzi's paraphrasing of a Harry Truman saying: ''
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