An online writer said that "refudiate" (this is in the urban dictionary) means, "I am a [insert insult here]." I would argue as much if it's so-miscalled "natural" meaning, but there are tricks.
In the same issue of that Newsweek which contained the Palin gaffe there was a pretentious article by a woman on psychologists experimenting on WEIRD undergrads. Where Weird stands for Western Educated Industrial republican democrats, or something. The article ended with a note about the actual i.e. factive universality of 'expressions of emotions', which got me thinking -- for 1 minute.
Indeed, it would be ODD that if I pinch you you will smile or laugh. Depends on with what. But if I hit you, say, you would hardly smile, or laugh either. Most likely you'll utter 'ouch' and display a facial gesture which will naturally-mean (in Grice's odd technicism) that your emotion is bad.
These things, the writer were saying, are UNIVERSAL. What is NOT universal is our sense of cooperativeness. She went on to explain that most undergraduates which are WEIRD and which constitute the 2/3 of the psychology-experiment population (our new rats, she called them) are 'pretty fair'. Same experiments in Turkey proved that in the prisoner-dilemma and some such, Turkey respondents would not care a fig about coming out with a fair or 'cooperative' deal.
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And then I shouldn't be reading cartoons, either.
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