Poetry News | Politics

The Sarah Palin poetry mother lode II: ShakesPalin in Twitterverse

By Harriet Staff

The wacky wordsmith from Wasilla is at it again!  Back for another epic showdown, it’s Palin vs. the English language, and it seems our favorite Alaskan underdog has quite a few verbal tricks up her sleeve. Yesterday, Palin’s use of the nonexistent word “refudiate” in a tweet – and her justification for it that “Shakespeare liked to coin new words too” – spawned the Twitter meme #ShakesPalin. The trending topic spread throughout the Twitterverse faster than a Siberian Husky sweeping across the tundra in an Iditarod race.  Who knows? Perhaps ShakesPalin took the moniker as a compliment. Has #CouricSpeare ever trended? We thinks nop (Is nop a word? Who cares!).

Some sample tweets from the Wall Street Journal:

@freehawk ’s “But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East, and I can see  Russia from my front porch”; @Paulandstorm ’s “Friends, Real Americans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar,  not to play “gotcha” journalism”; and @djsamk’s “Neither a thinker nor a reader be / for thought  oft loses both itself and friend / and reading dulls the edge of Fox TV.” (One more? Okay, how about @cartesianangst’s “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Couric,  than are dreamt of in your foreign policy magazines.“)

Posted in Poetry News, Politics on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 by Harriet Staff.