Let us not for a moment pretend that our language is static. New words are added to various dictionaries every year, and every year old, no-longer-used words are removed. Sometimes the meaning of a word shifts over time (which is why “flammable” and “inflammable” mean the same thing), sometimes words are created from other words (anyone enjoying a “staycation” this year?), and sometimes a word is born from simple human mistake. (The word “glamor” is actually a 10th century corruption of “grammar,” reflecting a belief that people who could read and write were thought to have almost-magical powers, a meaning that has itself drifted with time.) Languages are fluid things, with lifespans (the Ako-Bo language of India’s Andaman Islands was declared extinct just this year). And although I have a particularly extensive knowledge of current spelling and grammatical rules in English, I have always been perfectly willing to break those rules when an occasion seems to call for it. (One of my heroes, Bernard Shaw, devised a grammatical system entirely his own, eliminating most uses of apostrophes, for instance, so that he wrote “isnt” rather than “isn’t.”)
Recently, Governor Palin tweeted the following:
Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refudiate the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real
Yes, we liberals are tempted to snicker. Plenty of us are snickering. But here’s the lie (actually there are two, but I’m going to focus on one): the ones snickering don’t actually give a damn about the sanctity of the language, they’re simply doing it to score points against Ms. Palin’s policies. No great surprise, but it’s unjust and unfair and dishonest, and I don’t care who’s doing it, a lie is a lie and my job here is to call people out on lies. Even if that means taking the side of Sarah Palin.
(By the way: the second lie came when Governor Palin went back and corrected her tweet so that it says “refute,” which is correct. [Although “repudiate” would have actually been the better choice.] The usual practice with such things is to leave the original as it was and to add a notation afterward that the usage was in error, or that new information has been received. She should have done that. But it’s an easily-understood, human temptation to want to simply fix something so silly rather than have it live out there, so I’m really not bothered by it at all.)
But then a little later, the Governor tweeted this, as justification:
“Refudiate,” “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee'd up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!
Okay, now she’s pushing it. Yes, Shakespeare did indeed make up new words. (And for that matter, in Shakespeare’s time even spelling was more fluid than it is today—there are multiple spellings of the Bard’s own name that survive, including “Shackspere” and “Shaxpere.”) But inventing words in a literary context, where the invention is deliberate and considered (see Shakespeare, see Joyce, and so on) is a very different thing from using a word incorrectly in a political context and then trying to pretend that it wasn’t a mistake but was instead part of some grand tradition of linguistic invention. That’s simply politics piled on top of politics; a lie on top of another lie. (Like turtles, they go all the way down.) There’s also a difference between Ms. Palin and the second President Bush, both of whom “coined” new words because they don’t particularly know or care about the language except to the extent that it can be used as a political tool, and Obama’s “wee-wee’d up,” an odd expression to be sure but no one doubts that this president understands the language and sometimes uses it colloquially (and deliberately, with consideration) for effect. Language is a living thing, yes, but politics is still politics and let’s please not pretend that it ain’t.
Okay, good. I’ve managed to work my way back around to criticizing Sarah Palin. I feel much better now.
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