(FORTUNE Magazine) – And now Wordwatch: a featurette designed to help Mr. and Ms. Conservative Reader make it through the fall cocktail party season without having to fret that they are maybe not understanding all the latest ''in'' words and their connotations. --Majoritarianism. BORK AND OTHER REAGAN JUDGES FAVOR MAJORITARIANISM OVER INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS, HARVARD SCHOLAR CHARGES was the clunky headline atop the Cato Institute press release. The word in question is slowly ceasing to look like political science jargon and is filtering into the language. Thus far, ''majoritarianism'' tends to be used only pejoratively. It is a way of bad- mouthing folks who tend to prefer decisions made by democratically elected legislators and are suspicious of decisions made by judges. A Nexis search * tells us that the term had a bit of a vogue on the West Coast last year when various defenders of Justice Rose Bird were trying to explain (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) why voters should not kick her off the California Supreme Court. Rose was depicted as heroically resisting majoritarianism, her special concern in this area being persistent popular support for the death penalty. However, like many others complaining about majoritarianism, she had this little problem: The majority turned out to be against her. The oddsmakers in this department are expecting Bob Bork's critics to have the very same problem. --Dogolatry. The word is a recent creation of super-liberal-pacifist-columnist Colman McCarthy, writing in the Washington Post, but we instantly heard people repeating it and project it to attain a certain vogue among dirigiste dog haters. In putting the word onstage, McCarthy associated dog worship with certain themes congenial to your average liblab thinker. For example, dogs as pets are being popularized by the business interests (''sales of dog food reached a financial high in 1985''). Also, McCarthy wants you to worry about the morality of U.S. dogdom living better than one billion human beings. A powerful word. --Yippy-skippy. The prospects of this word depend entirely on Pat Schroeder, the Colorado Democrat who has been trial-ballooning her presidential run for months now. If Pat decides not to run, it will be possible to forget about ''yippy-skippy,'' as she may well be the only U.S. citizen over the age of 8 who continually invokes the term as a general expression of enthusiasm.