Jack Knox
Slightly Skewed
For those keeping score at home, here's where we sit as Sarah Palin continues to justificiciate her abuseling of the English language:
Last weekend, America's favourite future president/train wreck tweeted her desire for Muslims to "refudiate" plans to build a mosque near New York's Ground Zero. Apparently she was aiming for either "repudiate" or "refute" but crash-landed somewhere in the middle.
When it was pointed out that there ain't no such entry in her Funking Wagnalls, she quickly amended "refudiate" to "refute" -- replacing a made-up word with a real one, albeit inaccurately used.
But then she threw a deke worthy of an Alaska hockey mom, and reverted to "refudiate," reasoning -- again via Twitter -- that "English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!"
Except when Shakespeare made up a new word, he did it on purpose, whereas Palin simply drove off the linguistic cliff, then tried to claim that she was going four-wheeling.
Oh, lordy, but Palin is a gift from the ohmygods, the best thing to happen to political satirists since Stockwell Day showed up for work in a wetsuit.
Every time she tries to explain herself, a fire alarm goes off in Stephen Colbert's house, which is what happens when politicians compound ignorance with hubris. Hubris is hilarious. Satirists eat it like Popeye eats spinach.
Colbert, it should be pointed out, is himself a dab hand at this living-language business. He coined the term "truthiness," defined as the truth that a person knows intuitively without regard for evidence, logic, or bothersome facts. ("We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth -- the truth we want to exist," Colbert said.) George "They Misunderestimate Me" Bush relied on truthiness when invading Iraq. Truthiness allows middle-aged men to believe that the girl driving the beer cart on the golf course really does find them attractive.
Truthiness also inspired Palin to warn the American public of the "death panels" that would decide who lives and who dies should the U.S. adopt Barack Obama's health plan. Unburdened by proof, she threw the term around so much that it made the New Oxford American Dictionary's list of new words for 2009, although the publisher was careful to point out that death panels exist in theory only, just like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or the Canucks' penalty killing in the playoffs. Oxford also included such entries as "deleb" (a dead celebrity) "tramp stamp" (a tattoo on the small of the back) and "intexticated" (to become distracted by texting while driving a vehicle). Its Word Of The Year for 2009 was "unfriend," as in "Sarah Palin will unfriend me on Facebook if she reads this column."
Which, if nothing else, does back up Palin's description of English as a "living language." And a fun one. Just look at the results of a Washington Post contest in which newspaper readers were asked to take a word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting or replacing one letter, then provide a definition. Among the winners:
- Reintarnation -- coming back to life as a hillbilly;
- Osteopornosis -- a degenerate disease;
- Cashtration -- The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent;
- Bozone -- the substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.
It would be nice to bend the rules a bit and add "Palintology" -- the study of how the most powerful country on earth could confuse the terms "folksy" "perky" and "illiterate" with "presidential" -- but that might be a bit pot-kettlish coming from the country that set Jean Chretien loose on the English language like a Visigoth sacking Rome.
Besides, look too closely and you might find a mass of people whose vocabulary doesn't run much farther than a 140-character Twitter post. How can we possibly think clearly when we can't speak with precision? Please, dear reader, let us refudiate willful ignorance.
Literacy. Got to celebrate it.
