Ian Best writes: Since it was first used by Palin, and then commented upon by the media, I've heard the word [refudiate] used a couple of times in everyday speech. Both times it was used in a playful, ironic way, as if the person knew it was a Palin-invented, non-legitimate word. I.e. "You need to […]
My piece on Sarah Palin’s refudiate — “Got to celebrate it!” — is on Fresh Air today (weirdly edited and repunctuated on the NPR site but fixed now). I noodle over why Palin never cottoned to the error before she was caught called out and felt obliged to defend it: probably because repudiate is an […]
If you haven't quite yet gotten your fill after last week's refudiate-fest, I return to the Palinism in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. An excerpt of interest to all you antedaters: Some have observed that Palin isn't the first to invent the word refudiate. Patrick Galvin of Politico notes a couple […]
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Comedians and cartoonists continue to have fun with Sarah Palin's use of refudiate, and her Shakespeare-citing defense — here's Jeff Danziger's editorial cartoon for 7/20/1010:
[Note: Thanks to a link from Andrew Sullivan, our server is maxed out at around 2,000 visitors/hour, and things are a little slow. If you come back in a few hours, response times for browsing or commenting should be better.] Back on July 14, when Sarah Palin used the blend refudiate in her role as […]
In her most recent column ("Obama: Our first female president", 7/1/2010), Kathleen Parker argues that Barack Obama writes like a girl: If Bill Clinton was our first black President, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman President. […] No, I'm not calling Obama a girlie President. But … he […]
Down in South Carolina, there's a weekly webcast from local bars called Pub Politics (slogan: "Beer … bringing Democrats and Republicans together"). The hosts are Phil Bailey, the Director of the SC Democratic Caucus, and Wesley Donehue, a Republican political consultant. The most recent episode was taped at the Flying Saucer bar in Columbia, and […]
A Language Log reader named metanea points out to us that the Urban Dictionary claims aibohphobia is a technical term for the irrational fear of palindromicity. The etymology will raise a smile. Just stare at the word for a few seconds, and it will reveal itself to you.
It's no longer just imperial pontificators like George F. Will and Stanley Fish. The Obama-is-a-narcissist-and-his-use-of-I-proves-it meme has spread like kudzu, wrapping itself around the brainstem of every Fox News sub-editor and provincial pundit in the land. You couldn't kill it with a blowtorch. Fox News, specifically, has decided to count first-person pronouns in every speech […]
Via Talking Points Memo comes this correction from the Los Angeles Times: FOR THE RECORD: Sarah Palin: In some editions of Sunday's Section A, an article about Sarah Palin's speech to the National Tea Party Convention quoted her as saying, "How's that hopey, changing stuff working out for you?" She said, "How's that hopey, changey […]
Back in 2005, when George Lakoff's ideas about "framing" in political discourse were a hot media topic, the common journalistic mistake was to see the issue in terms of words rather than concepts. Now the whole issue seems to have fallen out of fashion — at least, an interesting study, published about a month ago […]
John Bainbridge's 1961 book The super-Americans: a picture of life in the United States, as Brought into Focus, Bigger than Life, in the Land of the Millionaires — Texas was originally published as a series of articles in the New Yorker. The first installment (March 11, 1961: p. 47) began with this sentence: It is […]