Sarah Palin is a polarizing figure. She’s wildly popular, either for the wrong reasons or the right reasons, depending on which side of the political spectrum you’re on and how much you like making fun of people. Still, she’s captured the public’s attention quite well, as shown by the fact that the word Palin invented, refudiate, was Merriam-Webster’s most-searched word of the year by far. Surely that’s a crowning achievement, even if you’re not one to combine refute and repudiate into a single, buzz-worthy utterance.
Amazingly enough, at least to a word nerd like me, is that the entire article above, apparently written essentially to bash Sarah Palin, completely neglects to use the actual word to describe what refudiate technically is. Refudiate isn’t a non-word or grammar error so much as it is a portmanteau, or a created word made by combining two existing words. Refudiate is Sarah Palin’s version of the word liger (or gerrymander and smog, since we’re talking politics and hot air), but because she’s a partisan political figure, it continues to exist only to mock her and her Shakespeare Defense.
Tags: portmanteau, refudiate, refute, repudiate, Sarah Palin, words, lexicon, most searched-for word of the summer, most searched words, Merriam-Webster, most searched word online, popular word searches
