Expanding the Political Lexicon, One Tweet at a Time

Juan Cole's must-read on the Palin-Shakespeare-Twitter kerfuffle:

There are many things wrong with the original tweet. “Refudiate” is, of course, not a word, and a case could be made for making Ms. Palin pay her parents back for all the money they spent on her education.

The phrase ‘stab you in the heart as it does ours’ should be ‘stab you in the heart as it does us’– she has incorrectly switched from a direct object of the transitive verb ‘to stab’ to a possessive modifying heart; in the first parallel phrase, ‘heart’ was the the object of a preposition.

The further errors in the tweet have to do with substance. A tiny fringe cult destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, not Islam in general (a religion of 1.5 billion human beings which could well be the religion of 3 billion human beings by mid-century). A monument to Usama Bin Laden or al-Qaeda would be in poor taste. A mosque, built anywhere in the United States, is not.

The #shakesplain hashtag on Twitter is hours of entertainment and you can play along!

Time's Joe Klein weighs in on the benign AND evil aspects of Palin's latest 140-character misstep:

Palin poses a potential gold-rush of neo-Americanoid language.

Little Green Footballs points out Palin used "refudiate" in an interview with Sean Hannity last week. It comes at the end around 2:35 in the clip.



The Guardian has an article and puts out a challenge to readers to coin their own new words. The comments below the article are worth the read including this:

Palindrone = the meaningless noise that comes out of Sarah Palin's stupid face.