GRIFFIN: Time for today's "Wordplay" where we take a term in the headlines that might be unfamiliar to a lot of people and explain it. Today, we've got "mud," which doesn't mean what you think it means, at least in the context of the Gulf oil disaster. Your average mud is wet, soft earth, right? Well, the mud everyone's focused on today is drilling mud, a manufactured fluid, usually a bentonite clay base with other thickeners added. It's normally used as an oil drilling lubricant, but right now, it is the main ingredient in BP's Static Kill plan. They've got more than a million gallons of this mud standing by. The plan is to start pumping it right down into that ruptured wellhead today. It is the first concrete step to plugging it permanently. Static Kill may plug BP's well, but it's not going to end the crisis for the people living along the Gulf coast and living with disaster after disaster. We'll talk about that next.
Wordplay: Mud; XYZ: Dealing With Disaster