Un-an-tici-pat-ed: adj. Lacking Foresight in Hindsight

But there are other reasons that government officials, businesspeople and the like might want to avoid the we-didn't-anticipate construction: It's a buck-passing maneuver and a tacit admission of failure, says Grant Barrett, the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang.

"It really means that you didn't have foresight, that you didn't plan well, that you were ignorant before and that you're confessing that you're not ignorant now," Barrett says. "You're basically providing your opponents with the wedge in which they'll place their hammer and chisel to chip away at your credibility. You might as well draw up your letter of resignation."

Often, Barrett says, we-didn't-anticipate can give the perception that you just ignored someone else's anticipation.

Many people, for example, had long anticipated the failure of the New Orleans levees despite President Bush's assertion to the contrary in an ABC interview in September 2005.

Some economists, such as William Nordhaus of Yale and Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, predicted that rebuilding Iraq would be far more costly than Washington experts anticipated, including former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. Others, including financial reporters and columnists, warned about the housing bubble long before Washington policymakers owned up to it.

And despite Vice President Cheney's assertion in June 2006 that no one "anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered" in Iraq, the record says otherwise. A number of defense and Middle East experts say administration officials ignored their warnings during the run-up to the war.

So the next time a twist of fate or failure goes unforeseen, you can bet that an official somewhere will trot out this catch-all phrase to evade blame or minimize damage. That we can anticipate.

Staff researcher Eddy Palanzo contributed to this article.