When Palin says refudiate, it's now a word

IS THERE NO end to the milestones that Sarah Palin has reached in her carefully planned jaunt to the Oval Office? From her vice presidential candidacy, to her book-writing, to her Tea Party universe, to her TV shows, she's now made it to the pages of the New Oxford

American Dictionary with a single word! Well, not really a word until she made it one, probably unintentionally at that!

The word: Refudiate. Translation: part repudiate, part refute. The New Oxford editors were so taken by it that they toasted it as the Word of the Year. Given that there are still about six weeks remaining in the year and the Mama Grizzly will still have a lot of things to say, the editors obviously are convinced that it's worth the risk that she won't come up with anything better. (The word was born in her protest of the proposed mosque near the Ground Zero site.)

So her linguistic miscue will forever be acknowledged in the New Oxford pages as a kind of nonsense chatter that was offered to us by Lewis Carroll in such meanderings as Alice's meeting with Humpty Dumpty in Jabberwocky. (Slithy, he explained , merged lithe with slimy.

But Palin is no Lewis Carroll. He knew what he was doing when he consciously created the words. With her, it just came out that way. We expect to see it on the Palin crowd's t-shirts. Operators will be standing by.