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.

The third time, being the charm apparently, she tried again, recasting the sentence slightly and the weaker reject, getting closer to what she wanted, but not quite there:

Peace-seeking Muslims pls understand. Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing

Reject can mean: to dismiss as inadequate, inappropriate, or not to one’s taste; to refuse to agree to a request; to rebuff or refuse to show affection for someone or something. I say it’s a weaker word choice because while it does address her belief that the mosque is inappropriate, it merely requests a simple dismissal of the plan. I think she wants something more visceral than that.

The word Mrs. Palin was seeking was, of course, repudiate–to refuse to accept or be associated with. (The word repudiate comes from the Latin repudium meaning divorce. Very visceral.)

Of course the left-leaning portion of the blogosphere went nuts, pointing to Mrs. Palin’s malaprop as demonstrative of her lack of intelligence. Whereupon Mrs. Palin defended herself by referring to a malaprop from President George W. Bush, and an odd turn of phrase from President Obama, and then, astonishingly, compares herself to the Bard of Avon :

‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!’

English is a living language spoken by billions of people the world over. It is the primary language of commerce. It is the language that most programing languages are based on. It is the language of air traffic control world wide; to be a commercial pilot, you must be fluent in English. And, unlike French, Spanish, Icelandic, and  84 other natural languages, there is no academy, no regulatory body for English. New words (neologisms) are constantly appearing, working their way into everyday use. Definitions and usage shift, and as much as I dislike it, even the rules of grammar change over time.

It’s fairly common for politicians to coin new words: Jefferson coined dozens of words, many that have made their way into everyday usage–belittle, authorization,  countervailing, indecipherable, public relations, and sanction, just to name a few–as did Washington (administration, indoors, ravine), Adams (quixotic),  Lincoln (relocate). And of course, Shakespeare is said to have coined more than 3000 words–some 1200 of which are still in use today.

So why can’t Mrs. Palin’s refudiate be a new coinage in the tradition of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln and, as she points out, Shakespeare? Well the answer would depend on how the word actually came to be. The aforementioned gentlemen knew how to use language, and the words they coined were constructed from appropriate lexical building blocks. Indecipherable, for example, has as its root cipher which means (among other things) “a coded message”. And decipher, meaning ”to decode”, has been in use in English since the 1520s. Add the prefix in- meaning “not”, and the suffix -able from the Latin and meaning “capable of being done”. Put them all together and you get indecipherable, an adjective meaning “not capable of being decoded”.

What can be made of refudiate? Well, an argument can be made that it’s a portmanteau word–a combination of two words or parts of words and their definitions that result in a new word related to the originals. Examples of portmanteaux include smog (smoke + fog), spork (spoon + fork), gerrymander (MA Governor Elbridge Gerry + salamander). So refudiate could be refute + repudiate meaning “to disprove and disavow”. This is a reasonable argument, and refudiate could become a useful word. Kirk Cameron, for example, might like to refudiate evolution theory.

But this argument begs the question, did Mrs. Palin mean to coin a new word? And that, I think is the key: intent. Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Shakespeare intended to coin new words–they needed words that conveyed their meaning, so they used their vocabulary and their knowledge of how words are constructed to create just the right word. I don’t believe that Mrs. Palin intended to create a new word, because the definition of the new word doesn’t fit the sense of the sentence. While one can disavow or refuse to accept or be associated with the development of a mosque and Muslim community center two blocks away from ground zero, adding the idea of disproving the fact of the mosque is nonsensical. Moreover, the two revisions of her tweet (neither of them getting her thought quite right) suggest that Mrs. Palin did not intent to create a new word at all.  She wanted to say repudiate.

As useful as refudiate might turn out to be, there can be no doubt that it’s a malaprop.

Can we then generalize anything about Mrs. Palin’s intelligence as a result of this malaprop? Probably not. At least not based on this one instance. If she had used it several times in a speech, or an op-ed piece, then maybe. But this was a Twitter post, and as such was similar to extemporaneous speech. Tweets, Facebook status updates, yelps, etc. are not formal composition–no one drafts and redrafts a tweet. They are usually written in the vernacular, on the fly, and with little in the way of proofreading before publishing. And repudiate is not a word that most people use every day. It isn’t on the tip of the tongue (or the fingers, for that matter).

I think what is more indicative of Mrs. Palin’s intelligence is her reaction to the uproar about her malaprop. She had two choices of how to react. She could have said something like “I had a brain fart! I meant to say repudiate, but for some reason, I couldn’t think of it–all I could think of was refudiate. I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t think of anything else.” A little self-deprecation demonstrates a firm sense of self-worth–a confidence in one’s achievements. Instead, Mrs. Palin chose to defend herself by comparing herself with George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and William Shakespeare (aside: One of these things is not like the others), and she comes off as being overly sensitive–as if she knows she lacks the intellectual chops to play in the political big leagues so she must quash any suggestion of foolishness on her part. Unfortunately, that stategy almost always fails at anything other than making her look even more foolish.

Of course, she could be doing this as a ploy to get people to misunderestimate her.

July 26, 2010 | Filed Under Rants and Observations 

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