The blogosphere erupted with laughter and ridicule this week when Sarah Palin sent out a tweet using a nonexistent word and then proudly mistook her illiteracy for literary genius.
Here's the tweet that started it, which Palin sent out in response to the controversy over building a mosque in New York City near where the Twin Towers once stood:
"Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate."Palin quickly found herself the butt of many tweets after it was pointed out that "refudiate" is not a word. So she deleted the tweet and replaced it with another:
"Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real."After being ribbed for misusing the word "refute," Palin quickly took down that tweet too. She then claimed common ground with no less than one of the greatest writers of all time:
"'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!"
Naturally, Palin's attempt to compare herself to Shakespeare led to a wave of mockery, including a hilarious Twitter topic thread titled #ShakesPalin, in which participants revamped classic Shakespeare quotes, Palin-style:
"To Be Or Not To Be...what was the question?" -@LiberalHitGirl
"To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous liberals, or to quit halfterm, and by opposing, rake in speaking fees." -@Normative
"But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East, and I can see Russia from my front porch." -@freehawk
"Friends, Real Americans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to play "gotcha" journalism" -@Paulandstorm
"Neither a thinker nor a reader be / for thought oft loses both itself and friend / and reading dulls the edge of Fox TV." -@djsamk
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Couric, than are dreamt of in your foreign policy magazines." -@cartesianangst
"I come to the Republican Convention not to praise McCain, but to bury him." -@AmyNitrate
"Mine is a tale told by an idiot -- full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." -@lesleyabravanel
"Get thee to a gunnery." -@manbartlett
"To be though in this great country of ours, is though, not to be. That is the question, here today in America. Also." -@GreenleeGazette
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Comments
I am amazed at the number of times SarahSpeare has made an ass of herself. I am even more amazed at how well loved she is by the Tea Party and the Republicans. If she ever made it to the White House, I’d “refudiate” my citizenship and move to Canada.
To be hope-y change-y or not to be hope-y change-y, that is the gotcha question.
Idiocy, thy name is Palin!
PALIN, THE NEW BARD
SHAKESPEARE? YOU WISH.
HEY SARAH! REFUDIATE THIS!
FELINI3 7-19-20
A rose by any other name,
Never mind. I quit!
IF SHE MAKES IT TO THE WHITE HOUSE WHO THE HELL OWNS THE CIRCUS?
“a witticism, a witticism. My kingdom for a witticism.”
Great post, I agree completely with Jon on the importance of this, Its great to see someone else realizes this.
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It scares the heck out of me to think she actually has followers that believe she can do no wrong. Lots of them! This woman is an idiot.
I have to disagree with the people who thought Sarah Palin was stupid for using the nonword “refudiate.” If Daniel Kurtzman had actually researched the word “refudiate,” he would have seen that it is an accidental blend of the words “refute” and “repudiate.” This is something Dan fails to point out in his article. Sarah Palin was simply making a careless mistake when she said “refudiate” instead of “repudiate.” She wasn’t being stupid.
Also her reason for misusing “refute” was because she failed to make a subtle distinction between “refute” and “deny.” To refute means to prove something is false. To deny means to claim that something is untrue. You can’t expect everyone to know such a subtle distinction.
Many educated people make these kinds of mistakes. There was an educated person who used the redundant phrase “decisional criteria.” The author Stephen King used the nonword “plotzo” in his story The Mist and misused the verb “skirl” in one of his other short stories from Skeleton Crew. I don’t see these people being mocked. To mock someone for making such careless errors is nothing short of being a douchebag.