"Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate" — Sarah Palin, in a tweet, 18 July 2010
About the Word:
Back in 2010, Sarah Palin brought to the forefront of national discourse the topics of neologisms, portmanteaus, and linguistic slips when she used the word refudiate a handful of times in various contexts. Many were agog at the notion that anyone could misuse refute or repudiate (the words she was assumed to be combining), even though neither is particularly common. Palin, for her part, defended herself on Twitter, noting that English is a living language, and that Shakespeare was rather fond of coining new words as well.
This did little to assuage her critics.
She could have pointed out that she was hardly the first person to use this word. A 1907 headline in The Evansville (Indiana) Courier read 'Said Hughes Got Aid From the National Administration and Refudiated It.' Numerous other instances of refudiate have been found in the 20th century, in a wide variety of settings. It can even be found in academic texts: the journal Archaeology had an article published in 1978 by William Rathje (who received his PhD from Harvard) which contained the line “A further pitfall in refudiating von Däniken's theories is our own lack of experience with certain simple tasks.”
None of these previous users of refudiate attracted nearly the attention that Palin did, and the word, for its part, appears to have little chance of seeing enough continued use to make it a longstanding member of our language.
Definition:
: apparently to both refute and repudiate
Photo credit: Wikipedia
