‘Breitbarting’: Another Word Enters The Political Lexicon
August 11, 2010
ENGLISH ADDED another word to its political lexicon recently: Breitbarting, or intentionally taking a statement out of context for political ends.
The new word surfaced on political websites after conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a video of Shirley Sherrod, a Department of Agriculture official, edited so she appeared to admit being biased against a white farmer. (In the full video, released later, it became clear that Ms. Sherrod was telling a story about overcoming her initial prejudice to help the farmer save his land.)
It was only a few days after the video was released that the verb made an appearance: one early use was by The Nation’s Ari Melber, quoted on Politico.com as saying “We live in a world where anyone can be Breitbarted.”
This is what linguists call an eponym, a word created from a person’s name. There are plenty of eponyms that are positive, reflecting their namesakes’ contribution to human knowledge: sandwich, leotard, cardigan. But those with an origin in the rough-and-tumble world of politics tend to be much less so.
Breitbart is just the latest political figure to give rise to a negative eponym, following in the footsteps of borked (meaning attacked in the media, from the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Robert H. Bork), quisling (a traitor, from Vidkun Quisling, who headed Norway’s government during the Nazi occupation), and gerrymander (to draw political boundaries for partisan advantage, fusing the name of Elbridge Gerry, a former governor of Massachusetts, with salamander, which is what the district drawn that way supposedly resembled).
