Latimer on Law & Politics

An Etymological Defense Of Sarah Palin

                                                    An  Etymological Defense Of Sarah Palin

                                                                'Twas brillig and the slithy toves

                                                                Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

                                                                All mimsy were the borogroves,

                                                                And the mome raths outgrabe.

                                                              -Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky,"  1871

           Supposing that, when Pistol uttered the well-known words -"Under which king, Bezonian, speak or die!"  Justice Shallow had felt certain that it was either William or Richard, but had not been able to settle which, so that he could not possibly say either name before the other, can it be doubted that, rather than die, he would have gasped out "Rilchiam!"  -Lewis Carroll, Preface to "The Hunting Of The Snark," 1874

          Sarah Palin has come under harsh criticism recently for having remarked that peaceful Muslims should please "refudiate" the building of a mosque near "Ground Zero" in New York City.  She is being criticized not only for opposing the plans for an Islamic cultural center a few blocks away from the former WTC site, but for having coined the word "refudiate" which appears nowhere in the OED or any other standard dictionary. Well, picky, picky, picky!

           This is not just another simple minded GOP politician  making up a word from whole cloth, like Harding who invented "normalcy" because he was semi-literate and ignorant of the correct usage "normality."  There was no reason for such a neologism to be coined, or to come into wider usage to supplant "normality," other than it had been uttered by an ignoramus who happened to be an American President at the time he used it.  Still, we can find the word "normalcy" in standard English dictionaries today.

            Palin and her defenders would have it that she was simply speaking in the tradition of Shakespeare, which is quite a stretch, while Lewis Carroll is a much closer literary antecedent.  In Through The Looking Glass, Alice encounters Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall.  Humpty is telling her about his mastery of words, so she asks him to explain the words used in Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky."   Humpty then  replies:

Well, "slithy" means lithe and slimy. "Lithe" is the same as "active."  You see it's like a portmanteau -there are two meanings packed up into one word.

                                                                     *         *       *

Exactly so.  Well, then, "mimsy" is "flimsy and miserable" (there's another portmanteau for you).

And so it is with "refudiate," clearly a portmanteau word worthy of Lewis Carroll, combining both "refute" and "repudiate."

             "Lewis Carroll" was the nom de plume of Charles Dodgson, a  mathematician and clergyman who wrote satirical prose and poetry, ostensibly to be read by children, which skewered the values and mores of Victorian society and politics. He devised the "portmanteau word" as an exercise in purposeful nonsense, using Humpty Dumpty as an exemplar of the smug and pompous English upper class for whom all meaning was self-referential.  "When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean -neither more nor less."

               Here's another example, with Carroll lampooning the mindless and officious adherence to protocol in the British maritime tradition.

The Bellman, who was almost morbidly sensitive about appearances, used to have the bowsprit unshipped once or twice a week to be revarnished, and it more than once happened, when the time came for replacing it, that no one on board could remember which end of the ship it belonged to.  They knew it was not of the slightest use to appeal to the Bellman about it -he would only refer to his Naval Code, and read out in pathetic tones Admiralty Instructions which none of them had ever been able to understand -so it generally ended in its being fastened on, anyhow, across the rudder.  The helmsman used to stand by with tears in his eyes; he knew it was all wrong, but alas!  Rule 42 of the Code, "No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm," had been completed by the Bellman himself with the words "and the Man at the Helm shall speak to no one."  So remonstrance was impossible, and no steering could be done till the next varnishing day.  During these bewildering intervals the ship usually sailed backwards.

Preface to "The Hunting Of The Snark." 

               Now, Sarah's no studied satirist like Lewis Carroll, but she really stands out as a self-parody of the mimsy and  slithy right-wing ideology that has taken over the once honorable GOP  in 21st Century America, with all its frumious reactionary negativity.  Not even Lewis Carroll could do a better job of lampooning today's Republican Party. 

             The GOP's recent adherence to that ideology, with its blind faith in the "free market" put into practice by deregulation of industry and finance, has proven once again to be the political and economic equivalent of the Bellman rigidly following the Naval Code as described by Carroll, which resulted in the ship sailing backward with nobody able to control the rudder.  So, while Ms. Palin's  call for American Muslims to  "refudiate" the planned cultural center amid the saloons and strip clubs surrounding the former WTC site is clearly a long stretch from Shakespeare,  it is a perfectly appropriate  example of the portmanteau nonsense words deployed by Lewis Carroll in his 19th-Century satirical works.

             It is very likely that Ms. Palin was uncertain as to which verb she should use here, "refute" or "repudiate," and she  simply conflated them so as not to appear completely ignorant -much like  Carroll's example of Justice Shallow who would have replied "Rilchiam!"  if he were uncertain about which king he should name when queried by Pistol.   Therefore, at least as far as  Sarah's call for Islamic refudiation of the "mosque"  in New York City is concerned, let's cut her some  etymological slack and not misunderestimate her as we did with George W. Bush.