From online source:
"Hey, Sarah might be onto something here. If every misspelled word is a new word because "English is a living language", then every high school student in Texas is just like Shakespeare a hundred times over in every single essay they write. Our students are actually brilliant...we just never saw it before. So we can cut even more spending on education, fire more teachers, and give the richest Americans another huge tax break! SARAH'S A GENIUS!"
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Sarah ...Dogberry!
ReplyDeleteS-speare of course uses malapropisms to humorous effect. But the point is that the person...usually a bumpkin of a sort, does not really know the meanings of the word--as with Dogberry he tries to sound pompous and edu-ma-cated, and speak the Queen's English, but his...synmatical abimities can't disallow him to depress his laudience of sophismicated arastophats. Or something. Actually at S-speare's time they were just shifting to Anglo as the courtly tongue, thanks to Hank VIII, that fat calvinist pedazo de mierda. The Plantagenet courts spoke french (and Shakespeare occasionally breaks into purrfect frenchy). Liz I spoke french, ...but was not so far in thinking from her corrupt father (and beloved by S-speare, ....apparently).
Excellent, quotable commentary, J.
ReplyDeleteOf course it was Palin who introduced the Shakespeare analogy as per the Newsweek quote with which I introduced this thread.
"Shakespalin" is now a common idiom, and Cleese is reported to have said that Michael is no longer the funnier Palin.
What Palin said was compare her 'refudiate' with Bush's 'misunderestimate' and 'we-wee'd' and write, "Shakespeare like to coin words, too".
Someone on the line said, "Get thee to a dictionary".
Yes. However, I ...think the usual blogger leftists overreacted to a minor mechanical glitch (she was writing, not speaking...then it would have been Dog-berryish) and pounced on the misspelled word like wolves on elk...
ReplyDeleteNot that I approve of Palin. But one notes a certain hysterical tendency to enforce grammar, aka prescriptive-ism around some blogs; loudmouth, moralist liberals (many from Bay Area) love to pick out one error and then claim see, she misspelled "repudiate", so she's unfit for office. She may be unfit for office, but one grammatical error doesn't show that. Though I don't agree with hardly any of Miss Palin's ideas I sort of pity her --the big corporate liberals (like at SNL, or the usual Dinkocrat blogs) who have gone into Palin-attack mode are hardly superior anyway.
Bush's speaking was worse. He sounded like a drunken Texas frat boy business major most of the time. Ah will not, not troops in harmz way...
Well, but apparently there is a book out, called "Misunderestimate", which I think IS a good word, and not 'invented' by Bush anyway. Obama has so far mainly coined 'we-weed up' meaning 'agitated'. "we-weed up in Washington".
ReplyDeletePalin's 'refudiate' has been found in earlier sources, one 1925, as I recall -- so it was not really her coinage -- although for practical purposes it was, in that she possibly was not aware that the word had been used before.
She first SAID it in a television interview. She then also used it in TWITTER in a written form. She deleted that message, and used 'refute' instead. A THIRD Twitter message listed her 'refudiate' along 'misunderestimate' and 'we-weed up' and making the Shakespeare connection.
An online source has it exactly as what J has it, a Dogberryism --. I prefer to dwell on the 'semantics' and 'pragmatics' of the term. Apparently, it cannot be 'reduced' to 'repudiate' and 'refudiate'. But it does not seem to be a blend either. It has been compared to 'dupper' -- a blend of 'dinner' and 'supper' (which makes sense for those dialects where 'dinner' is the important meal of the day, not necessarily the 'evening' meal --).
My special interest is in the Gricean approach to expression meaning in terms of utterer's intentions -- 'refudiate' means what Palin thinks it means -- AND the pragmatics: alla Grice's 'visa' (a linguistic, he thought, gap). I.e. the NEED to fill a semantic gap by bringing in a coinage. The coinage is out there now and taken sarcastically alla Berkowitz or seriously alla Kroll. Etc.
The important source is the original utterance. I will see if I can paste it and comment.
-- the one that goes "pls refudiate".