Jigar and I have been talking about starting a blog for awhile now. We generally agree on most political issues, so instead of feeding our own little echo chamber, we figured we should start putting our thoughts out there for other people to critique. I remember when I first heard that Sarah Palin (or whoever posts her tweets for her) used the word refudiate while tweeting about the Ground Zero Mosque. Part of me chuckled a little, because the ex-half-term governor just keeps adding unintentional comic relief to our otherwise totally serious political discourse; another part of me died a little because her star just continues to rise. This is the face of our new leadership.
I thought to call this blog "refudiation nation" to pay homage to Palin's little faux pas, but before I could even put pen to paper, the New Oxford American Dictionary selected "refudiate" as the 2010 word of the year. Seriously, what is going on in this country? Why are we celebrating ignorance? Apparently, refudiate is a verb used loosely to mean reject. Interesting... that sounds kind of like the definition of repudiate (with the qualifier "loosely" thrown in there because refudiate is not really a word). Palin - or her handlers - probably got confused thinking about the word "refute". But if that were the case, shouldn't our new word be "refutiate"?
To be fair to Palin, the word refudiate has been used in the past, but it only became popular after her infamous tweet. That, however, is not the point. From what we know of Palin since she stepped onto the national scene, she's no wordsmith. She says things like "shucks" and "I'll get back to you" when asked what periodicals she reads to get her news. The point is that her usage was an error, or a typo, and instead of calling out the mistake, she now gets credited with creating a new word.
This kind of stupidity is just one sympton of a larger problem. We are devaluing education. Take climate change for example. The entire world, save the United States, now agrees that humans are influencing warming patterns. This is not a global conspiracy here -- this is science. Remember science? The beauty of science is that it is objective. You formulate a theory, and then you test that theory over and over again. If your theory holds up, then you have advanced the thinking on a subject; if it doesn't hold up, then you were wrong, and you probably need a new theory. With climate science, scientists from all over the world independently developed theories, and tested them over and over again. The United Nations joined the international scientific community to further study the issue, and the bulk of the evidence says humans are causing global warming. Most of the world is on board with these studies, but in the U.S., it has gotten to the point where Republicans in Congress realize that the science just isn't on their side. Their answer then, is to remove science from the political process.
But what is the alternative to science? Unfortunately, the alternative is superstition. Personally, I like superstition when it comes to meaningless, trivial things - like choosing which piece of Michigan apparel I wear on Fall saturdays - but not so much when it comes to policy issues, and, you know, things of actual consequence (though I'm sure my wife would refudiate that by suggesting that the outcome of Michigan football games do have very real consequences for her home life). Politics have become so polarized in our country, and we cannot seem to agree on anything. If we remove science from policy, what possible objective measure is there to guide our decision making? Remember last spring when there was a huge snow storm, and everyone on the right was screaming "See, look how cold it is! Global warming is a myth!" That will be the new political discourse. Whatever uncritical thought our leaders have on a given day will be the new guiding principle. By the way, has anyone noticed how unseasonably warm it is in Chicago this November? We better pass cap and trade now, at least until January when it gets really cold and we decide to repeal it because we've changed our climate assumptions.
Our country is falling behind the rest of the developed world in education. Is that surprising to anyone? Instead of telling Palin to buy a dictionary or use a spell check, we just change the dictionary to accommodate her vocabulary. Politicians on the right, including Palin, criticize Obama for insufficiently touting America's exceptionalism. And they're right; it is absolutely exceptional that Sarah Palin can make up a word, and instead of correcting her, we just add her mistake to the lexicon. What kind of example are we setting for our students and our children? I might be overreacting just a little. It is hard to follow grammar rules when communicating complex messages with a maximum of 140 characters. But Palin has ascended to political stardom. Sort of like how athletes are made into role models whether they like it not, Palin is now an "important" person, and she should be held to a higher standard. (As an aside, the example she's setting has clearly hit home. You can read about her daughter Willow's homophobic facebook rant in the news today. Willow: if you want people to take your hate seriously, the least you could do is use proper grammar.)
There's actually nothing wrong - in concept - with Palin making up a word. Our language is alive, and it is evolving all the time. Here are some of the other candidates for word of the year:
Bankster: a predatory banking professional.
Crowdsourcing: using a group of freelancers to work on a task.
Those examples actually make sense. Whoever crafted them isolated an event or a circumstance, and created a word to describe it. The problem I have with refudiate - in practice - is that all Palin did was swap a "p" for an "f" to (accidentally) make a new word that means the same thing as the old one. Refudiate adds no value. It isn't shorthand, it is just a stupid mistake. As I said above, Palin didn't coin the word herself. But whoever used it in the past probably just made the same mistake she did. I'd guess the word didn't catch on until now because the last person to utter it was likely met with the question, "hey, don't you mean repudiate?" That person clearly wasn't as important as Sarah Palin. I guess I need to come up with a new name for this blog.
