Sarah Palin did it again. Turned a gaffe into political capital (or debacle, depending on how you see it) when she insisted that the word she coined “refudiate” was a deliberate invention, Shakespeare-like, rather than an ignorant flub. The word is the result of Palin’s mingling (or mangling?) of the dictionary words “refute,” meaning to disprove, and “repudiate,” meaning to reject or renounce. Her supporters politely call it a “neologism,” a coined word that expresses a new concept. Detractors, however, maintain that it’s a “malapropism” a hilarious if not dimwitted slip of the tongue one that Palin, in covering up her mistake and insisting on its legitimacy, has turned into a pretentious sleight-of-tongue. Since people actually saw through the verbal maneuver, this tack hardly bodes well for her political ambitions.
As reports have it, Palin used the word in her Twitter message last July when she appealed to American Muslims to oppose the building of the Ground Zero mosque (“Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate”), and in her interview with Sean Hannity over Fox TV when asked about allegations of racism within the Tea Party movement. The slip was immediately trounced upon by critics. Palin quickly deleted her first message and in her next tweet changed the word to “refute” (as in “refute the… plan”) which didn’t quite fit the context. Then, perhaps advised by her handlers, she re-installed the word “refudiate,” and defended it as an example of Shakespearean panache. Shakespeare, as we know, invented a whole slew of colorful words and phrases that have enriched the English language for example: “new-fangled,” “bedazzle,” “misanthrope,” “obscene,” “good riddance,” “forever and a day,” “naked truth,” “pound of flesh,” “crack of doom,” to name but a few. Palin, the shrewd politician, capitalized on this fact, and in her tweet invited everyone to “celebrate it!”
The interesting development is that no less than the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) has called “refudiate” the 2010 Word of the Year (WOTY), besting other words such as “spillcam,” referring to the technology of live video feed used to broadcast the BP oil spill; “vuvuzela,” the plastic horns that droned endlessly during the last World Cup in South Africa; “crowdsourcing,” or the act of distributing tasks to undefined groups of people in order to tap public talent (outsourcing from the crowd); and “bankster,” meaning an unscrupulous banker who classifies as a gangster. Does this mean that the NOAD, this illustrious arbiter of words, has stamped upon this Palinism (hey, Palin isn’t the only Shakespeare-wannabe hereabouts, is she?) its imprimatur?
Well, not quite. NOAD senior lexicographer Christine Lindberg says this does not mean that “refudiate” is now an entry in any of their dictionaries. She explains that the WOTY merely serves as a “time capsule” of words that became popular or notorious in a given year. However, by saying that the word “refudiate” “more or less stands on its own” in a context that cannot be rendered “precisely” by either refute or repudiate, the NOAD somehow justifies Palin’s use of the word and points to it as the one worth watching out for.
I’m all for inventing words and coining new phrases to describe ideas, concepts, technologies, discoveries, realms of experiences that emerge out of our teeming imaginations, as our world evolves and changes. Where would we be without quarks, bio-imaging, nanotechnology, rap, e-mail, emo-rock, iTunes, podcasts, eBay, texting?
But “refudiate”? All it reminds me of is my motormouth neighborhood gay “salon artiste” complaining between curlers and henna and hairpins in his teeth that the government “should imfose pa ng mas maraming fubberty-rejuvenation frograms, o diva?” Nothing wrong with that we understood each other perfectly it’s beyond Palinesque but it’s a long shot that we can imfose fubberty on the NOAD, much less frofose fubberty-rejuvenating frogram initiatives to the government.
Whether you agree that Palin’s position is convincing or not, this lexical tempest in a teapot only goes to prove that:
1) Language is a living thing it’s capable of growing new words and shedding old ones no longer deemed relevant. “Google,” “blog” and “tweet” weren’t invented until the cyber age came upon us and Internet use became the norm. Today they’re more than popular they’re words we can’t do without. Obsolete words on the other hand become archaisms and pass out of usage. Do we still ever say thee and thou, mayhap and forsooth? I knowest not about thee, thou nullifidian, but, forsooth, perchance, methinks ‘tis a fogey that darest! (Shakes, wring my neck!)
2) Language rules aren’t etched in stone grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary change over time. Was it not no less than the Great Bard himself who prompted his character Mark Antony to lament about “the most unkindest cut of all”? Ouch, grammarians would protest today at the use of such double superlatives. Use a similar sentence in your essay and you’re likely to be asked if you flunked your high school English! It won’t do to insist that the usage has a venerable pedigree in this case, what’s past isn’t prologue but past, period.
Pronunciation is another area where much variation takes place, for there are as many ways of uttering speech sounds as there are tongues. Peculiarities of pronunciation may be endemic to a locality or ethnic community, but when demographic changes occur, communities and dialects get shifted around. A classic example is the way the Great Vowel Shift linguists’ term for that dramatic alteration in pronunciation that occurred towards the end of the Middle Ages ushered in Modern English. How exactly this came about we have no way of knowing for certain. Perhaps the mobility of populations in an increasingly middle class society contributed to it. I guess a move up in the world needed a corresponding hoity-toity upward movement of the palate. We only observe that more than 600 years ago, in Chaucer’s time, words like our present-day “time” used to be pronounced (with accent on the first syllable) “teem-uh;” “sweete” (sweet) was “sway-tuh;” “roote” (root) was “rohw-tuh;” “bathed” was “bah-thud;” “floure” (flower) was “fluur”; and the rrr’s were rrrolled (trippingly on the tongue, as our favorite Bard would say) so that the language may have sounded more like the Scottish brogue which is the effect you get when you listen to a recording of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Then, for some reason, a dramatic change took place over the next couple of centuries, resulting in the modern pronunciation and spelling familiar to us today.
What will the language sound and look like 500 years hence? We can hardly speculate over so vast a period, linguistically speaking. But current global changes give us a hint as to what may be in store for English in the coming decades.
Which brings us to the third point.
3) Language users dictate the way the language changes. When a community (a group of people with shared experiences) pronounces or uses a word or phrase or modifies grammar in a particular way, and it works for them, then it becomes theirs and the expression passes into the lexicon of the language.
Usually people with power and influence within the community “dictate” how language is used; similarly, communities or societies that wield power and influence over other communities and societies establish the norms for the language. Thus what we dutifully call “standard English” refers to the kind spoken by those who supposedly know the language best: the white, educated, native English speakers of Anglophone countries. On the other hand, slang, and even vulgar (from the Latin vulgus, meaning common people), refers to English spoken in the streets or by the (immigrant) masses. In between is a whole spectrum of registers spoken by all sorts of people according to various communicative purposes (are you addressing a scholarly forum, writing for a magazine, or tweeting on the sly about the wine served at last night’s dinner?); social status (are you conversing with Bill Clinton, chatting with your BFF, or instructing your house help?); and context of speech (are you presenting a proposal to your CEO, or are you telling a bedtime story to your preschooler?).
Technology helps in the dissemination of a language. English would not have spread the way it did during the Renaissance without the introduction of the printing press into England in 1476 by William Caxton, who printed more than a hundred titles (no mean feat for that era) and translated many works into English. In so doing he helped to standardize the language and brought it to a wider reach. In the case of Sarah Palin, her verbal faux pas spread virally through the Internet, triggering violent reactions, until it caught the eye of lexicographers (who by the way are a charming subspecies of humans forever on the prowl for new words, the more sensational the better). The speed and versatility of Internet platforms enabled lightning-quick access and feedback, something that would have been unthinkable two decades ago.
The fact that Palin is a high-profile figure who manages to whip up a storm even without trying racked up the value of her word and sealed its choice as 2010 Word of the Year. (My poor neighborhood gay hairdresser wouldn’t have stood a chance.) Whether it survives all the heckling that it has provoked to become a “word aptly spoken” remains to be seen. Prognosis looks bad, though, as the general reaction has been more negative than appreciative. But then, as Lindberg likes to point out, so was the initial reception of the word “normalcy,” which was coined by controversial American president Warren Harding in 1920, in place of the correct form “normality.” Apparently, despite the scathing criticism of the American public at the time, Harding’s word has caught on and today is as normal as apple pie.
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Next week: How are global developments affecting English?
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Your comments are welcome. E-mail me at urbanpilgrim2010@gmail.com or urbanpilgrim2010@yahoo.com.