Who's the Real Maverick?

The term "maverick" is being tossed around a lot these days, from campaign stump speeches to Tina Fey's brilliant sketches on "Saturday Night Live." And the New York Times looks back at how the word came into the language in the 1800s.

The original maverick, it turns out, was Samuel Augustus Maverick, a noteworthy figure in the early days of the state of Texas. Maverick, for whatever reason, didn't like to brand his cattle, and livestock he owned wandered about unmarked. And so the word maverick came to mean cattle that bore no man's brand, and, ultimately, people who were utterly independent.

An irony in all this is that the original Maverick's descendants are horrified to hear presidential candidate John McCain appropriating the word to describe himself. Samuel Maverick's granddaughter, a progressive Texan, explains, "He's a Republican. He's branded."