Vanity Fair, In the News: Sarah Palin Sure Isn’t Making Up Words Like She Used To

VF Daily: Culture-Society-Politics: Sarah Palin Sure Isn’t Making Up Words Like She Used To

Sarah Palin, writing for noted medical quarterly Facebook.com, has published a piece about the state of the health-care system. Titled “Lies, Damned Lies,” the note makes considerable use of scare quotes, rhetorical questions, and the threat of death panels, a phrase invented, coined, and popularized by Sarah Palin in August of 2009. Regarding death panels, Palin writes that health-care law enables the goverment “to say no to your request for treatment of the people you love.” Certainly, one could also argue the same was true of insurance companies declining to accept patients with pre-existing conditions—a practice that’s now significantly decreased with Obamacare. In any event, the resurrection of the phrase is the second instance of Palin’s recent attempt at re-popularizing discarded scare-terms.

In an interview with Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren on Wednesday, the America by Heart author said that it was “funny” that “we are learning more about” Delaware senatorial hopeful Christine O’Donnell “than anybody even bothered to ask about Barack Hussein Obama as a candidate and now as our president.” While “Hussein” is not an imaginary word or phrase, it is an appellation that has, in recent months, faded from popularity and is used mainly by Birthers. Palin’s re-appropriation of the term heralds its re-introduction to mainstream discourse. As it happens, as CNN points out, when this Barack Hussein Obama was allegedly a candidate for the 2008 presidency, the Palin-McCain camp chastised their own supporters for invoking the “Hussein” appellation. “We do not condone this inappropriate rhetoric which distracts from the real questions of judgment, character, and experience that voters will base their decisions on this November,” a Palin spokesperson said at the time.

Is Palin’s gift for neologism depleting? Her most recent noteworthy contribution to the vernacular was “refudiate,” an artless blend of “repudiate” and “refute.” On the Internet, the word inspired farce, not fear, and has hardly had the same effect on political discourse as “Hussein” and “death panels.” That said, “refudiate” was crowned Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Summer,” as the term “sparked more searches in the publisher’s online dictionary than most real words did,” according to the Associated Press. If only the “Word of the Summer” designation came with money or power, Palin might be content to carry out her career as a wordsmith.