So says Sarah Palin
April 20th 2011 10:10
One of the tougher jobs in the world is to make decisions on what non-words should become words. The responsibility for these weighty decisions rests with publishers of dictionaries, who recognise that language is a restless beast which must grow.
None is more restless than English, which is also, with the exception of Mandarin, the world’s wordiest language. Despite its size, or perhaps because of it, there is a never-ending list of potential newcomers, and there always will be while we have consummate word manglers like Sarah Palin.
Not that many Palinisms are serious candidates for promotion to full lexicological recognition, but when you have so little command over language, communicating with what might be termed a scatter-word approach, some mistakes will be less wrong than others.
Take the Palin invention “refudiate”, for example.
Last year Palin called on US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle to “refudiate” a claim by America’s National National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that the country’s right-wing Tea Party movement was racist.
Obama, perhaps because he had no idea what an act of “refudiation” might involve, failed to act, but the publishers of the Oxford range of dictionaries did act. It added the word to its list of candidates for elevation, it pondered and discussed and pondered some more, and than it said, “From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used 'refudiate,' we have 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,'.''
So Sarah Palin has created a word. I’d call it dumb luck but you might think I’m jealous.
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