Refudiate.
The word is less than a week old, but it has already taken the Web by storm, whisking its inventor Sarah Palin along with it.
On Sunday, the former Alaska governor and one-time vice-presidential candidate hopped on her Twitter account to make an impassioned plea for Muslims to "pls refudiate" a proposed mosque near the former site of the twin towers.
Ms. Palin quickly deleted the tweet and replaced it with one using the word "refute," but not before bloggers and Internet followers had retweeted the original and taken screen shots of it.
By that point, an appearance Ms. Palin had made five days earlier on Fox News' The Sean Hannity Show resurfaced on the Internet. On the clip, she says that U.S. President Barack Obama and his wife had the power to "refudiate" claims that the Tea Party movement is racist.
In the hours after Sunday's tweet, Ms. Palin wrote several more railing against a plan to build a 13-storey mosque in a downtown Manhattan building two blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood. Later she owned up to the slip, defending it by comparing herself to one of history's great wordsmiths in the tweet embedded below:
Misunderestimate is a reference to one of former U.S. president George W. Bush's famously inventive linguistic constructions, while wee-wee'd up refers to a statement Mr. Obama made to supporters in August 2009: "There's something about August going into September, everyone in Washington gets all wee-wee'd up," he said.
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs later clarified, "I think 'wee-weed up' is when people get all nervous for no particular reason … Bedwetting would probably be the more consumer-friendly term for it."
It's not the first time Ms. Palin has come under attack for her creative interpretation of the English language.
James Wood, writing in the New Yorker magazine in October 2008 during the U.S. election, took issue with Ms. Palin's use of the word "verbage."
"That remarkable term, so close to garbage, so far from language," he wrote.
Ms. Palin's meandering syntax and confusing sentence structure during the 2008 campaign caused liberal opponents to suggest she wasn't fit to serve as vice-president. Conservative supporters claimed she was being unfairly attacked.