The ground rules for the interviews were that Ford's remarks would be embargoed throughout his lifetime. Upon President Ford's passing last month, however, the public came to learn of Ford's opinion that Dick Cheney had been "an excellent Chief of Staff" for him but that he had "become much more pugnacious" as a vice president.

That news sent pugnacious to the list of most frequently looked-up words on Merriam-Webster Online for the last four days of December, and it held Number 1 spot for two of those days.

The Unabridged defines pugnacious (which comes from the Latin pugnus, meaning "fist") as "having a quarrelsome or belligerent nature; thriving on challenge." That same pugnus lies behind the words pugilism, poniard, and, pungent.

Of the half dozen words that might be used interchangeably with pugnacious, the synonym paragraph in the Unabridged offers this guidance to differentiation: Pugnacious indicates ready and pleasurable willingness to fight. Belligerent may describe a country or group actually at war; bellicose, a pronounced inclination to fight. Combative may mean either pertaining to combat or, more positively, willingly ready for combat. Then there's contentious, which implies a perverse and irritating fondness for arguments and strife, and finally, quarrelsome suggests a fretful ill-natured disposition to quarrel for a petty ill-grounded reason.