Move Over Palin, Warren Harding Invented a Word Too

Earlier in the week Sarah Palin earned special recognition from the New Oxford American Dictionary for coming up with the word of the year. "Refudiate," a word she coined over the summer, is a combination of "refute" and "repudiate". However, Palin is not the first aspiring President to have invented a word that actually entered the our lexicon.

"Normalcy" was used interchangeably for the correct word "normality" back during the 1920 presidential election, and it was the brainchild of then Senator Warren G. Harding. Running on the theme, "a return to normalcy" after the end of WWI, his use of the word can be heard below at 1:09:

As you can tell, his rambling speech is replete with adjectives and vague thematic references. This style of stumping became known as "bloviating," which is defined as such: "to talk aimlessly and boastingly". Harding may have been bloviator in chief, but he did become president, so perhaps this foreshadows Sarah Palin's own political future...