Studies of the Web as a corpus of linguistic usages: Bush dodgers

In the car taking us to the University of Toronto at Mississauga the day after George W. Bush was reelected to a second term as President of the United States of America, I mused to my companions about the numbers of "Bush dodgers" who would be coming up to enrich Canadian life the way the draft dodgers did at the end of the nineteen-sixties.

Afterwards I told myself that the term Bush dodgers was an obvious one to coin in the Canadian context, so I decided to do a Google search (5 November 2004) to see how current the term was. As usual, Google gave me a good picture of its use.

From the results I obtained the earliest attestation was in a blog by Shatnerian (resident in Quebec) dated 23 July 2004. It starts:

Most of the occurrences of the term Bush dodgers are to be found in blogs. Google offers the following:

Louisa Herron Thomas writes a most informative and helpful text on the Slate site in answer to the many enquiries about moving to Canada. "How To Move to Canada. Will they take us in?" posted on 3 November 2004 includes the sentence

In the 4 November 2004 issue of The Martlet: The University of Victoria's Independent Newspaper, Megan Stewart writes a profile of several Bush dodgers in an article entitled In writing about one of them Stewart links the present to the past:

When an expression is taken up by the popular media you know it has gained wide currency, at least potentially. In a highly entertaining article entitled "We await their arrival" published in the Toronto Sun on 2 November 2004 columnist Gary Dunford starts off:

© 5 November 2004 Russon Wooldridge