With the new administration in Washington having been in place for more than two months, it seems like a good time to take a step back and have a look at two of the more interesting words we’re now hearing bandied about in the news.

Let’s start off with the big one: doge, which is  defined as “the chief magistrate in the republics of Venice and Genoa” by the folks at Merriam-Webster. They go on to say that the word is also “an intentional misspelling of dog,” and that it’s “an Internet meme involving a picture of a shiba inu dog captioned with humorously ungrammatical phrases” (such as “much wow” and “such happy”).

The dog that inspired the famous “Doge” meme was a rescued shiba inu (which translates to “brushwood dog”) named Kabosu. She became an internet celebrity after social media users spread a now-famous photo of her sideways glance, which her human, Atsuko Sato, posted to her blog in 2010.

Thus, the meme called “doge” was born. The intentional misspelling is often credited to a 2005 episode of “Homestar Runner,” an animated comedy web series. Sadly, Kabosu “fell into a deep sleep” and “crossed the rainbow bridge” last May at the age of 18, wrote Sato in her blog.

“Doge” has also referred to a cryptocurrency since the 2013 launch of the Dogecoin. The coin was created as a joke to mock cryptocurrencies, but increased in value years later after Elon Musk, then the world’s richest person and a champion of Dogecoin, tweeted about the currency.

And of course the capitalized acronym DOGE also stands for the Department of Government Efficiency task force.

According to CNN, “The once-obscure Office of Personnel Management, essentially the human resources department of the federal government, is now ground zero for Elon Musk and President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash bureaucracy and deconstruct vast portions of the administrative state. Current and former OPM employees describe an agency that’s been taken over by a shadow operation of political appointees affiliated with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.”

Isolated on the secure 5th floor inside the agency’s Washington headquarters, DOGE is now reportedly mainly staffed by loyal, young Musk employees who “are now effectively in charge of OPM, issuing government-wide directives that are seen as blueprints for carrying out the administration’s vision to shrink the government,” according to CNN.

The other term we’ll look at is “viewpoint discrimination,” which is when the government restricts speech based on a particular opinion. It is a form of content discrimination that’s especially offensive to the First Amendment.

Viewpoint discrimination happens to be at the center of the tiff involving President Trump (who wants to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America) and the Associated Press (which doesn’t). “Trump’s order,” notes the AP, “only carries authority within the United States. Mexico, as well as other countries and international bodies, do not have to recognize the name change. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.”

The article goes on to explain that “The Associated Press will use the official name change to Mount McKinley. The area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country. The AP Stylebook will be updated to reflect both decisions.”

If you pay attention to such things, I’m sure that you will notice a lot more interesting words, phrases and memes coming from Washington in the next few years – some of which might even be printable in a family newspaper.

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at [email protected].