Refudiate: Neologism or Malaprop?

“When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” — Humpty Dumpty to Alice in Through the Looking Glass.

A week or so ago, Sarah Palin (via her Twitter account) asked peaceful Muslims to refudiate the plans of the Muslim community in lower Manhattan who want to build a mosque and community center about two blocks from Ground Zero:

Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate

Within a few hours she changed the tweet to the more established, but still incorrect refute:

“Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real.”

Now, refute means to prove something (a statement or theory) to be incorrect or false: to disprove. So Mrs. Palin is asking “Peaceful New Yorkers” to disprove “the Ground Zero mosque plan…” That’s not quite what she meant. Read more

July 26, 2010 | Filed Under Rants and Observations | View Comments

I Used to Write a Lot

Back in the day when the Internet was fun–back before USENET was a abandoned to the spammers pushing porn–there was a small group of (should we call them friends? I don’t know) who hung out on alt.fan.tom-servo. It was an interesting cast of characters with a wide variety of interests, but our chief interest seemed to be making each other laugh, usually at the expense of someone outside the group via cross-posting (this was known generally as trolling, although we practiced a specialized for of trolling called peeping).

AFT-S has a very few of the old irregulars posting there anymore. There have been maybe 5 threads started in 2010–compare that to dozens a day in the late ’90s early ’00s–the irregulars have gone on to other things. It’s sad, really. But sometimes I get nostalgic and I go back and read some of the threads from back in the day. Back when Babylon 5 was still new, when people cared who the better Captain was: Sisko, Janeway, Kirk, or Picard, or which would win in a fight: the Whitestar or the Valiant.

I was once awarded the Peeping Commendation Medal for a post I did on an animated TV show called God, the Devil and Bob. You don’t remember GtD&B? I’m not surprised. NBC ran exactly 3 episodes before it was cancelled because of complaints from Religious People who took Offense at the premise, the content, the execution, etc. I didn’t care much for GtD&B, but I could see where it was going. I was a retelling of Job (you know, the story in the Bible where God and the Devil test Job to see how strong his faith is), and I though it was ridiculous the Christians would be offended by a modern retelling of Job. So I decided to have a little fun. Read more