Sarah Palin's Shakespearean Tweets

Wise Words: refute, repudiate or refudiate?

Which one of this week’s Wise Words would choose to complete this tweet?

Not sure? Then, let’s take a look at the definitions from the Macmillan Dictionary.

• refute: to say that a statement is not true or accurate without giving proof or to prove that a statement is false
  

Well, that wouldn’t make sense here.

• repudiate: to say formally that something is not true or to state that you do not accept or agree with something
  

The second meaning could be possible. (Even if you disagree with the statement, the usage would be correct.)

Macmillan (or any other standard dictionary) doesn’t have a definition for the last option — but that didn’t stop Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and John McCain’s vice-presidential candidate in the 2008 US presidential election, from choosing it for her tweet.

"Refudiate" certainly looks like a real word ("ate" is definitely a common suffix, and "re" is a common prefix). But it doesn't exist! When Palin was criticized for using it, she deleted the offending tweet, re-posted the same text with “refute” instead of "refudiate" (which was also wrong — see above —  so it was also deleted). She later posted another tweet in which she compared herself to Shakespeare.

“‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!”

(George Bush used “misunderestimate” to mean "underestimate", and Barack Obama used “wee-wee’d up” — "wee-wee" being child-speak for "urine" — to mean "get nervous for no particular reason".)

Palin is right. English is a living language. New words are constantly being created. You could even argue that “refudiate” is a portmanteau of “refute" and "repudiate”. (For more on this topic, see our explanation and exercise on established portmanteaus, which are words that are created from the beginning of one word and the end of another, such as “smog”, from “smoke” + “fog”.)

But Palin is no Shakespeare (or Lewis Carroll). For someone to create a genuine portmanteau word, there has to be a connection in meaning from the original words to the new word. There should also be gap in the language that makes its creation necessary. Palin’s “refudiate” doesn’t fill any gap — it just shows she has a gap in her knowledge of the language. 

Meanwhile, people in the Twitter community are using Palin's mistake as an excuse to write Palin-style Shakespearean quotations (using the portmanteau hashtag #shakespalin to describe them). I've collected four of my favourites and turned them into an exercise on Shakespeare. 

Impress your business colleagues by learning a few legendary words from Shakespeare — not from Sarah Palin.