From online source:
"The Twittersphere erupted Sunday when former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin tweeted that "peaceful Muslims" should "refudiate" the mosque being built in New York City near where the Twin Towers once stood. Palin found herself the butt of many tweets, as refudiate, of course, is not a word in the English language. After deleting the offending tweet, Palin replaced it with another calling on "peaceful New Yorkers" to "refute the Ground Zero mosque plan," which only added to the confusion because it would appear the word she was looking for was "repudiate.""
i. The Muslims should refudiate the mosque.
ii. The Muslims should refute the mosque -- and its plan.
iii. The Muslims should repudiate the mosque.
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ReplyDeleteI like "refudiate." I don't like that Ms. Palin didn't know it was a word, but I like the way she dipped into the primordial soup of her linguistic brain and fetched a bit of debunkation and a bit of disassociation to make a Frankenstein's Monster of a word. IT'S ALIIIIIIIVE!!!!
ReplyDeleteYes. The details of how she first tweeted, 'refudiate', and then opted for 'reject' and 'refute', as I recall, to finally (if you allow me the split infinitive) conclude that, like Shakespeare (and Bush and Obama) she likes to coin words, was brilliant.
ReplyDelete--- It has been suggested that someone may have advised her that Shakespeare did coin words. I'm not too strong on Shakespeare, but I would think the context is different. In those days, people were hardly literate and in any case, did not tweet. (So, the audience of a Shakespeare play may NOT have known as they do those who follow Palin's steps to the extravagant detail, that he was COINING a word).
It should be pointed out that when I FIRST read the message, 'refudiate the mosque', *I* (for a second or two) was confused. Interestingly, the root -fud- appears in Latin 'refundere' (I am told). So, 'refudiate' can be compared with 'refund' a mosque, or 're-found' a mosque. This, 'refund' -- is a basic POSITIVE meaning that 'refudiate' cannot have. But we infer as much from her 'communicative intention' rather than bottom-top (from expression to intention).
It is this Griceian aspect that interests me. We know what she would say about the mosque.
"Pls --- [insert verb] the mosque".
And confronted with a neologism or a word unknwon to target (addressee), the addresee works from the intention (to refudiate, as it were) to the 'meaning' of the expression.
And in most cases, the level of what an expression means should NOT count. In Palin's case, it counted, because her critics criticised her for using a non-word (or non-using a word) or something.