FOR a man untroubled by the need for linguistic purity, President Bush surpassed even himself yesterday as he sought to portray President Saddam Hussein as a scheming and evasive dictator.

U.S. President George W. Bush speaks to members of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America on Neville Island in Pittsburgh on September 2, 2002.

Declaring that Saddam had "crawfished" out of previous agreements with the United Nations, Mr Bush accused him of "stiffing the world".

In doing so, Mr Bush appeared to have invented a word. The verb "to crawfish" is unknown even to slang dictionaries, although it must derive from the crawfish, or crayfish, a reshwater crustacean.

According to linguistics experts, such evocative use of the word as a verb has grown in recent years in the US to describe someone who backs out of a position.

Asked about the President's use of the word, Ari Fleischer, his spokesman, referred to broken Iraqi commitments to disarm, adding: "This is what Saddam Hussein has tried his best to slither out of, as the President put it, 'to crawfish out of'."

Mr Bush went on to say that he would use an address to the United Nations General Assembly next week "to call upon the world to recognise that he is stiffing the world".

In this context, the President meant cheating or duping the world. An American who has been short-changed would complain in the vernacular of being "stiffed".

But it may be wise for Mr Bush to rethink his choice of words before he addresses the United Nations in New York on September 12.

Apart from threatening to plunge the simultaneous translators into meltdown, such language feeds the image overseas of Mr Bush as a hopelessly inarticulate, trigger-happy cowboy, one that Tony Blair was at pains to say this week he regards as a parody.

But it is not the first time that Mr Bush has raised eyebrows with his homespun choice of words to articulate pivotal moments in his presidency. In the days after September 11, Mr Bush referred to the 19 hijackers as "those folks". When talking of al-Qaeda, he promised to "smoke 'em out".

And in his most famous lapse into folksy rhetoric, he demanded Osama bin Laden "dead or alive".

(Agencies)