Looks like "refudiate" is OED word of the year. Not quite sure why. Researching.
Joanna -----------------------------------------
The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have a history of plucking their word of the year from the technological zeitgeist. Last year’s word of the year was unfriend, an obvious reference to Facebook’s meteoric rise to popularity. This year’s word of the year is plucked from a social network too — Twitter — but it’s not Twitter’s coinage: it’s three-quarters term former Alaskan governor and would be VP of the United States, Sarah Palin.
You probably remember the ruckus over a Tweet that Sarah Palin posted over on her official Twitter account last July in which she said:
Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.
It’s refudiate that raised heckles from critics, who pointed out that no such word exists in the dictionary. On her part, Palin replaced the word — a portmanteau of refute and repudiate — with refute, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but whatever.
She needn’t have gone through the bother, as it turns out. Now that the OED has declared “refudiate” as their word of the year, it actually will be in dictionaries, and Sarah Palin can use it proudly once again. Say what you will about Palin: there’s not a lot of people who have come up with new words mainstream enough to be accepted by the editors of the OED.