Jan 31, 2012

Language lives

Erin McKean invited submissions of neologisms in her last column in the IHT. We reply:

Dear Erin,

in your IHT column, you invited the submission of neologisms. Here's a list I *thought* to have come up with during the last two years:

Trump House (play on White House)
to birther (raising the issue of Obama's birth)
public parts (opposite of "private parts")
de-seat (getting up, in analogy to de-plane)
kay (as in: 100k)
thanky
murderee
palinized
rational exuberance
period porn
beltway addicts
palin' around
to unanswer (a question)

http://morefreedomfries.blogspot.com/

Now, before I wrote (composed, haha) this email, I checked the originality of my inventions via Google, and found out that all --- except for the last two ("palin' around" is of course a play on Sarah Palin's expression "[Obama] pallin around with terrorists") --- had already been invented elsewhere before. But still.

One last remark: the prefix negation "un" is getting a lot of mileage recently. To unanswer here is meant to duck a question in a fuzzy way, like in: "The way Barack un-answers things."

Kind Regards, Michael M.

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