Between his early days as a congressman and his latter years as elder statesman, Nixon was praised, vilified, disgraced, and admired: in short, our 37th president had a checkered political life. His linguistic legacy was checkered too, but in a different sense; of course, we're referring to the famous Checkers speech. In 1952, the young California senator and vice presidential candidate faced charges he'd benefited from a secret political fund. Nixon went on nationwide TV to present lugubrious details about his modest finances, proudly describing Mrs. Nixon's respectable Republican cloth coat and admitting the family had been given a cocker spaniel dog that, he said, "our little girl Tricia . . . named . . . Checkers. . . . [T]he kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it."

Response to the speech was warm; Nixon retained his slot on the ticket, the Republicans re-took the White House, and Checkers speech entered the lexicon. The phrase is now shorthand for "a speech in which a person portrays him or herself as unjustly victimized and plays on emotion to gain sympathy." Such manipulative speeches often are fraught with self-pitying personal detail that both embarrass the listener and render the speaker as much a figure of ridicule as of sympathy.