Palin Misremembers Inventing a New Word
On last night’s episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska, the former governor tried to explain how it was a simple typo that created the new word, “refudiate.” She said she just mistyped a tweet on her Blackberry.
However, the New York Daily News points out that Palin’s memory “is not entirely accurate. Prior to her Twitter message, she misspoke the word on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show while discussing the NAACP’s stance on Tea Party racism.” - PolitcailWire
“If Sarah Palin tells you anything … double check it.” - @davidfrum
“Come on, dictionary. Shouldn’t the ‘Word Of The Year’ be better than Sarah Palin’s accidental mashup of ‘refute’ and ‘repudiate’? And we know it was an accident, because Palin herself went back and changed the Tweet to say ‘refute.’ Yet then [she] went back again to Twitter and defended herself, writing ‘Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!’
Well there are a couple of differences between Shakespeare and Sarah Palin. For one, when Shakespeare coined new words, it wasn’t by accident. He came up with words like ‘submerge’ and ‘sneak.’ He didn’t just take two words that kinda mean the same thing and then smash them together to make a third word that also kinda means the same thing.
…Shakespeare crafted new words; Sarah Palin got into a word fender-bender. And when Shakespeare did come up with new words, he certainly didn’t say ‘Got to celebrate it!’ In fact, I bet he never said that. ‘Shakespeare, what are you doing at the club?’ ‘Just finished Twelfth Night—got to celebrate it!’
Finally, we don’t need ‘refudiate’, because we already have ‘repudiate.’ You can’t just change the ‘p’ in the word to an ‘f’ and then say you made a new word. If it’s that easy, then I just came up with one. Here, I’ll use it in a sentence: ‘New Oxford American Dictionary, please stop rafing the English language.’”
“‘Refudiate’ Enters the Dictionary
After enduring waves of mockery, Sarah Palin’s Twitter-inspired “refudiate”—a portmanteau of “refute and repudiate”—has become the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2010 Word of the Year. The dictionary’s editors reviewed Palin’s use of the word and “concluded that neither ‘refute’ nor ‘repudiate’ seems consistently precise, and that ‘refudiate’ more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of ‘reject.’” After first using “refudiate” on Twitter, Palin suggested she was following in Shakespeare’s footsteps by coining her own vocabulary.”
Thinking about making it a community tumblr. Any suggestions?
“Despite the Top Secret attention, the #1 most-read story at the Washington Post site on Monday was the flap over Sarah Palin’s pathetic coining of the word ‘refudiate’.”
“Palin making up “refudiate” not that unusual. She likes to stick an “FU” somewhere in everything she says.”
