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Monday, August 2, 2010

Maybe it's an Austrian word

refudiate
Posted by at

4 comments:

  1. JAugust 2, 2010 at 12:33 PM

    Perhaps....she really meant Refuddiate. As in...Elmer. You wascally wabbit, I hereby refuddiate youse. Consider yourself refuddiated!

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  2. Luigi SperanzaAugust 2, 2010 at 12:44 PM

    Yes, that should merit a different post, since Elmer has no Austrian stock in him, does he?

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  3. JAugust 2, 2010 at 12:59 PM

    Not sure. Maybe there's something online re the noble Fudd family. But at times Fudd's sort of...germanic. Like with the opera toons. Fudd even sings an Wagnerian aria or two, doesn't he? With the ox horns and all.... Kill da wabbit. Kill da Wabbit!

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  4. Luigi SperanzaAugust 2, 2010 at 1:03 PM

    Yes. As it has been noted both 'p' and 'f' (as in 'repudiate' and 'refudiate') are both LABIALS. And as someone remarked, in some languages, either 'p' and 'f' are used indistinctly -- e.g. Elmer's idiolect.

    By bringing Shakespeare in Palin is reiventing the Tudor root.

    It has been argued that she didn't 'coin', as she claims she did, 'refudiate' ("Shakespeare liked to coin words, too", she tweeted -- "You gotta celebrate that"). Since it had been used before, she did not 'invent' it either, some liberals argue.

    I would go with them, but note that we have a case of 'disimplicature' here, where 'invent' or 'coin' CAN be used provided in the "mind" of the utterer there was no knowledge of what other people had done before. Or something.

    Note that unlike most Dodgsonian portmanteaus, this is a triple, combining, refute, repudiate, and 'refuse', for surely you can refuse a mosque, I expect?

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