Hillary On the Hill, Chapter Umpteenth

She's usually in one of the big chairs in those marbled Senate hearing rooms, but today she's at the witness table in her confirmation hearing for Secretary of State.

Are her colleagues giving her a grilling, or just a once-over light searing?

Senatorial courtesy already puts her in the fast-track lane to confirmation, so absent some substantive fireworks, it's still worth observing her style.

Hillary Clinton is a formidable veteran on the international stage, but there are still quirks to her speaking style. First is her oddly formal use of a long-a article, making her remarks sound slightly scripted. A long-a rhymes with ''play,'' so Clinton says ''a final point, a new approach, a variety of ideas, a nuclear weapons state.'' It sounds slightly stilted and stiff. Once in a while, as she answers a question more conversationally and spontaneously, she slips back into using the short ''a.'' What, I wonder, would a scholar of public speaking would make of this?

For so disciplined and orderly a speaker, she did have a little goof, which touched me. In her opening statement, she meant to refer to a ''bottom-up approach'' but she instead spoke of a ''bottoms-up approach,'' which made me think there would be a few drinks lined up on the desks at cocktail hour every evening in Foggy Bottom.

I'm always bemused when politicians screw up cliches. Cliches are their stock in trade -- how can they mess them up? Last week, the Illinois state representative Mike Bost excoriated Gov. Rod Blagojevich for having ''snubbed his nose at the oath of office.'' Blagojevich does have rather a snub nose, but what the governor has done is to thumb his nose at the oath of office.

One word Clinton and many others in government used in the past was ''player,'' meaning a government or agency with a role in political or diplomatic matters. Lately that's been replaced by ''actor,'' which is often spun negatively, like a poor movie performance -- such-and-such a radical group is a ''bad actor'' in the Mideast.

Has Hollywood noticed? Has Alan Rosenberg filed a complaint?