You know who Sarah Palin is, right?
She’s that most painful of creatures – a self-righteous, insular hockey mom with the backing of a powerful political party.
And she’s also not very bright.
Which is perhaps a great reason to keep herself AWAY from social media tools, like Twitter, for instance.
The great TweetMachine has a brutal reputation for smelling out screw ups, and then tearing them apart in creative ways.
So when @SarahPalinUSA (Palin’s verified Twitter feed) tweeted the following, it raised some eyebrows:
Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.
You don’t need any context to this besides the knowledge that “refudiate” does not exist in the vocabulary of any language.
It seems that Palin’s use of the word “refudiate” is the unplanned spawn of a linguistic Palin-rape of the words “refute” and “repudiate”.
Fine, so she’s not a clever cookie, and we all had a few laughs. End of story.
And then, oh, and then Sarah put her foot in it.
At 9:38pm, on the 18th of July 2010, @SarahPalinUSA, obviously feeling a little skaam at her last attempt at English, tweeted the following:
“Refudiate,” “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!
No, my love, stop. You’re not Shakespeare, and you shouldn’t give people who are smarter than you comic ammunition.
Comparing yourself to Shakespeare after making a balls up, for example, is probably a bad idea.
And with that, the trending Twitter topic, #ShakesPalin, was born. In an avalanche of glee, literally millions of Tweeters (Sarah can be the sole Twit this time round) joined in, rehashing their favourite high school Shakespeare phrases with generous doses of Palin folksiness.
Here are a few of the better ones:
@freehawk: But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East, and I can see Russia from my porch.
@Eric_Haywood: “Cry havoc, and let slip the hockey moms of war!
@richardhine: “Love sought is good, but given at a national convention, is better”
And then we all figured we’d stop procrastinating, and get the hell off Twitter.
