Ms. Network News

“Come on, dictionary. Shouldn’t the ‘Word Of The Year’ be better than Sarah Palin’s accidental mashup of ‘refute’ and ‘repudiate’? And we know it was an accident, because Palin herself went back and changed the Tweet to say ‘refute.’ Yet then [she] went back again to Twitter and defended herself, writing ‘Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!’

Well there are a couple of differences between Shakespeare and Sarah Palin. For one, when Shakespeare coined new words, it wasn’t by accident. He came up with words like ‘submerge’ and ‘sneak.’ He didn’t just take two words that kinda mean the same thing and then smash them together to make a third word that also kinda means the same thing.

…Shakespeare crafted new words; Sarah Palin got into a word fender-bender. And when Shakespeare did come up with new words, he certainly didn’t say ‘Got to celebrate it!’ In fact, I bet he never said that. ‘Shakespeare, what are you doing at the club?’ ‘Just finished Twelfth Night—got to celebrate it!’

Finally, we don’t need ‘refudiate’, because we already have ‘repudiate.’ You can’t just change the ‘p’ in the word to an ‘f’ and then say you made a new word. If it’s that easy, then I just came up with one. Here, I’ll use it in a sentence: ‘New Oxford American Dictionary, please stop rafing the English language.’”