Semantics and politics make a familiar pair. Every other day, it seems, something crops up in the mine-strewn worlds of domestic or international politics that makes us stop and think about the meaning of words. One day it's a foreign president's legalistic musings about the meaning of "is," the next, a governor's or prime minister's verbal blunder or an international incident such as the one that kept Chinese and American diplomats busy recently sifting the nuances of the word "apology" in two languages. This week, however, semantics was exercising minds in an unusual setting: the world of sports. In a finish so dramatic and perfectly paced it seemed scripted, Tiger Woods won the 2001 Masters golf championship in Augusta, Georgia last Sunday, his fourth straight professional major, and immediately brought a simmering semantic debate to full boil.

How, the golf gurus asked, should Mr. Woods' remarkable feat be classified? The problem centered on the meaning of the word "slam." Everybody knows, or thinks they know, what this means: winning all of something. The phrase is better known, perhaps, as "grand slam," which is doable in many fields, from card games, where it means taking all the tricks in one hand, to baseball, where it denotes a home run with bases loaded, to sports like golf or tennis, where it means . . .

Ah, but now we're back where we started. Mostly, it is not a problem. A grand slam in tennis or golf means winning all the major or designated tournaments in a single year. A career slam means winning those tournaments over a lifetime, something Mr. Woods has already done at age 25. (Bridge also has the useful "little slam," which means winning all the tricks in a hand but one). Tennis players pull off grand slams from time to time, but in golf the feat has only happened once, when Bobby Jones did it in 1930, which is why some people have been anxious to claim it for Mr. Woods, who has now won within a span of just 294 days the U.S. and British Opens, the PGA Championship and the Masters.