Refudiate
From my notebook:
8:33 PM. Rainbow out. At 7:47 it was like night looking out my bay window. Sunset is 8:46. I thought I would drive out to the woods and try to get in my walk before the rain came. Made it three quarters of a mile from the truck before the downpour. Downpour Nature sucks. I made it back to my truck sopped (but did keep my pipe lit). Driving back I watched the rainbow. --The great thing about outdoors just before a storm is the light. It's unworldly, often an eerie green, touches of brilliant yellow-white. It does express the wild, and that right here inside the city. On either side of these woods I go to there are miles and miles of houses.
So, Refudiate.
I copy the original tweet as it's printed in an opinion piece by Bill Kristol:
“Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as itOriginally I heard that the nutroots were going wild over new evidence that Palin was a moron: "She can't spell." So I went to the tweet and read it three or four time. I can't spell either, I know that, I couldn't post without spell-check, but as I read through that tweet I couldn't spot the misspelling. So I went to some actual nutroots commentary and I found the misspelling was "refudiate". I never noticed. The word was perfect.
does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate."
And the Kristol piece makes the same argument:
Just before noon on Sunday, July 18, 2010, Sarah Palin enriched the English language. Referring to the planned Islamic center near the 9/11 site in New York, she tweeted: “Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.”Perfect. This is a mind that creates, and does it subconsciously, as do all the best verbal artist. And the nutroots? well, they of course don't create, can't think, and can't recognize excellence. I suppose that's why they find their nitch is being left, where "excellence" is whatever they define as excellent, and always in opposition to what has historically, over millenia, been considered excellent. That's generally the way of the present intelligentsia: So inferior to the past, so inflamed in their self-assessment, the only way they can achieve stature is to define the inferior as superior, crap as excellence. For them it's a very useful orientation, they're very good at crap.
Presumably, Palin was wavering between “refute” and “repudiate,” and, in the heat of the tweeting moment, typed or BlackBerried or iPhoned or texted the new amalgam, “refudiate.” Pedants in the blogosphere got all huffy. Palin decided to double down. A few hours later, she follow-up-tweeted: “English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!”
The core of Kristol's argument is this:
Not that there’s anything wrong with “refute.” It means, according to Webster’s Third, “to overthrow by argument, evidence, or proof; prove to be false or erroneous.” Nor is there anything wrong with “repudiate,” meaning “to cast off . . . to refuse to accept as having rightful authority . . . to refuse approval or belief to.” And they’re distinct. To refute is primarily an intellectual act; a thinker refutes a claim or an argument. To repudiate is a practical or political act; a political party repudiates a sect that holds a discredited (and perhaps refuted) argument. A refutation that isn’t followed by a repudiation is just talk. A repudiation that doesn’t include a refutation is just arbitrary action.
The case for linguistic innovation is this: We need a word that captures and conjoins the meanings of refutation and repudiation. And we need it now. To save the country from the ravages of contemporary liberalism, we have to refute liberal arguments and see liberal politicians repudiated at the polls. So the conservative agenda is, in a word, refudiation. Indeed, given the dramatic moment at which we have arrived, one might say that we now have the prospect of a grand refudiation of liberalism.
This is good stuff. One other fellow (unfortunately I can't find the article now and so can't link) noted that in the middle of refudiate is the solid separate sound "feud", and no politician more than Palin is in a feud with the present powers and conformist thought of American leaders.
--And this fellow also thought there might fairly be read an historical allusion, to the Refuseniks of the Soviet era, those who resisted the tyranny of their time.
So in one word: Refute, Repudiate, Feud, Refuse. Pretty darn impressive. And it's a political mind that does that kind of thing effortlessly.
Last note. This is something I may expand on later because it's so much fun. Why did Sarah go through seven colleges before she got her degree? That's considered a negative. It's actually a splendid fidelity and a consideration on her part, and anybody who can't instantly recognize it as that is really dumb. The components are these: Her beauty, and her first love, Todd Palin. --Man, I'm in love with Sarah.
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Just a bit on the oil spill. This from the NYT:
The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.And from an email I wrote April 4, though I could have written it just a few days after the spill began:
The immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20 oil rig explosion are largely gone, though sightings of tar balls and emulsified oil continue here and there.
Reporters flying over the area Sunday spotted only a few patches of sheen and an occasional streak of thicker oil, and radar images taken since then suggest that these few remaining patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters of the gulf.
A little on the oil spill. Will there be environmental damage? Probably not that much, the media and enviro-wackos like to hype these things. There are many factors but the primary protection is just the distance from shore. That gives the oil time to separate into different components, and gives the really volatile stuff--the stuff that does the greatest damage to living cells-- time to evaporate. By the time it gets to land it will primarily be just gunk. Gunk is hard on feathers and fur, but that's about it. (Some of this separation happens just rising up through one mile of water.)
This is pretty obvious stuff, both as to what would happen with the oil, and what would happen with the media. The MSM thought process is always correct.
posted by mouse at 7:44 PM
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