Hillary, as we all know, is in trouble. Recent and damning accounts of her problem private-brew email server "Top Secret" and "SAP" emails make her vulnerable to Justice Department calls for indictment and worse.

In her own defense, Hillary uses a strange locution. Says Mrs. Clinton, “This is just another example of a leak…”

The word “leak” may have one meaning to a potential criminal, and another for newsreaders without major crimes hanging over their dyed-blonde helmets of soi disant invincibility.

Average news consumers regard a “leak” as something that oozes out of elite official circles that is unintended to be known to the public at large; this leak is usually true accounts of some event, happening, or peccadillo the fifth estate would rather not be acknowledging, or for some reason cannot acknowledge.

But in the cautionary mouth of the Democratic sometime frontrunner, "leak" seems to take on a different coloration. To Mrs. C, leak here seems to mean a fictional bit of gimcrackery that has somehow been invented and come to the public’s attention, without underlying merit or independent truth. Empirically baseless, therefore dismissible.

Clinton is parsing words in a way she wants to color them. Looking back, one can observe this language parsing to suit is a Clintonian hallmark.

Even using the term "leak" indicates a peculiar harkening back to her husband’s …seminal… locution, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” in Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings and the leadup to it.

No matter what a word might mean for millennia, Mrs. Clinton twists it -- perhaps by force of her own habit of turning all events into indictments of others and deflections from any personal responsibility of her own (“What difference, at this point, does it make?” she asked of the deaths of four American citizens in Benghazi due directly to her personal failure of any intervention or support, at a national inquest into her part in the lethal episode.)

This can be explained partially as the fallacy of equivocation, which a fact sheet from the Texas state university philosophy department defines as “when a key term or phrase in an argument is used in an ambiguous way, with one meaning in one portion of the argument and then another meaning in another portion of the argument.”  

Clinton uses “leak” in this way -- she wants to retrofit the meaning of the word generally understood as a fact-based info nugget unfortunately let out of the self-imposed noose of journalists’ or government’s holding, a stray hair falling out of a shellacked hairdo, to a self-serving and unsupported meaning of “lie set loose deliberately for some [nefarious] reason unaligned with truth in any sense.”

Catherine Herridge, Fox News senior political reporter, said that on “Meet the Press”, HRC invokes the famous words of stylist/writer Gertrude Stein when she comments:

On Sunday, when asked about her email practices while secretary of state, Clinton insisted to CBS News’ "Face The Nation," "there is no there, there."

She invokes conspiracy by any and all opponents, primarily her “primary enemies,” as she so colorfully noted in answer to one national debate question, Republicans. In addition to spectacular failures in conducting her job as secretary of state, her serpentine lies on any number of occasions over decades, and her simmering Clinton Foundation fiduciary scandals, Clinton is guilty of more than lying, covering up malfeasance on an Olympian scale, and wearing unflattering pantsuits to public for emphasizing her unfortunate addiction to carbs and adult beverages. Ms. Hillary is guilty, too, of language misappropriation.

She’s a leaky bloat.