‘Refudiate’ just a typo, Palin now says
By IANSTuesday, December 28, 2010
WASHINGTON - Former US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who hit the headlines after coining a word “refudiate” on Twitter, has now claimed that the word was just a simple typing error.
“I pressed an ‘F’ instead of a ‘P’ and people freaked out,” she said on a recent episode of her reality show “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”.
The former Alaska governor also pointed out that the blunder was the second-most searched word on Google trends, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.
“Make lemonade out of lemons,” she said.
At that time, Palin acknowledged in a tweet that she had created a new word. Besides, Palin used the word “refudiate” on a Fox News appearance before she used it on Twitter.
The original Twitter post said that “peaceful Muslims” should “refudiate” instead of “repudiate” the mosque being built in New York City near where the twin towers once stood.
After deleting the offending tweet, Palin replaced it with another calling on “peaceful New Yorkers” to “refute the Ground Zero mosque plan”, which only added to the confusion because it would appear the word she was looking for was “repudiate”.
“Refudiate” was named the Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year for 2010. The word, believed to be a mixture of “refute” and “repudiate”, was also named the number four top words of 2010 by the Global Language Monitor.
