I’m a bit amused at the kerfuffle in the dinosaur media today. It has to do with one or more tweets from their favorite whipping girl, Sarah Palin. Seems she made up a word. Good for her! Although, I’d bet a moose and a pair of mukluks she was not the first person to use in a sentence the portmanteau word, refudiate. Clearly, Palin was imaginatively working within the 140-character limitation in Twitter in expressing the sentiments of both “refute” and “repudiate.”
I can’t speak for you, gentle reader, but in the family I married into, you aren’t somebody unless you use some good portmanteaux, which also can be classified etymologically as neologisms. Fantabulous. Flustrated. There are more, but I have worked too hard to repress them from my mind. 🙂
Meantime, while Sarah’s inventive way of packing extra meaning into her tweets has the press atwitter, they have not been keeping their eye on the ball as additional evidence from the REAL journalists of the 21st century accumulates on topics ranging from bald, undisguised racism from government bureaucrats to the realization that Stupak and his Stuges got sold a bill of goods in the healthcare reform debate because it is now clear that in a number of states, federal tax dollars will indeed be used to pay for abortions. Crickets.
Critical Condition 
Leave a Reply