Archive for July 20th, 2010
Litterpick
Last night we went on a town centre litterpick ahead of the Britain in Bloom judges walking around today – making sure the place is as tidy as possible. It is amazing with so few smokers there are so many dog ends. One usually blames fast-food outlets for litter but there was surprisingly few FF items – a few coffee cups and that was about it. Most of the litter was smoking related – fag ends, fag packets, cellophane wrapping, Rizla fag paper packets with a bit of bubble gum thrown in – a lot of which was centred on places where people sit on benches.
To refudiate or not to refudiate . . .
A Twitter posting on Sunday from Sarah Palin, in which she claimed common ground with Shakespeare, started the blogosphere’s week in rollicking fashion.
Palin tweeted that "peaceful Muslims" should "refudiate" the New York mosque being built near Ground Zero. This prompted plenty of retweets at her expense – "refudiate," of course, is not a word.
After deleting the offending tweet, Palin replaced it with another, calling on "peaceful New Yorkers" to "refute the Ground Zero mosque plan" – although the word she was apparently looking for was "repudiate."
Then came the kicker: To quell the ribbing she was receiving on Twitter, Palin posted another tweet: " ‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!"
This spawned plenty of scorn Monday in liberal blogs, as well as a new meme on Twitter, #ShakesPalin, in which participants revamped classic Shakespeare quotes, Palin-style. Perhaps the best came from the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez (a.k.a. @Normative): "To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous liberals, or to quit halfterm, and by opposing, rake in speaking fees."