Possible word of the year

[Joel S. Berson]

One can thank the Republican God that the stage-hand didn't bring out
a metal chair, but a wooden one for Eastwooding.  (I think!  The
on-line videos are pretty dark.)

Joel

At 9/1/2012 10:00 AM, David Barnhart wrote:
>eastwooding, verbal. n. {w} Also written Eastwooding.  See the quotations
>for the meaning.  Nonstandard (used in slang contexts dealing especially
>with U.S. politics; frequency?)
>
>
>
>The Smithsonian Institution, with hilarious seriousness, traced the
>tradition of politicians' interrogating empty chairs back to "at least
>1924."
>
>A brand-new word was born: eastwooding, the act of talking to an empty
>chair. Twitter, Instagram (in which photos are conversational tender), and
>Pinterest were furnished with people's photos of furniture, of themselves
>lecturing, upbraiding, arguing with their sofas, stools, and settees. The
>hashtag #eastwooding ricocheted to at least 29,000 Twitter accounts,
>according to TweetReach. John Timpane, "Eastwood unseats Romney; Chair chat
>is meme of the moment," The Philadelphia Inquirer (Nexis), Sept. 1, 2012, p
>A01
>
>
>
>The Twitter handle "Invisible Obama," which said it was sitting "Stage left
>of Clint Eastwood," quipped that "The GOP built me." An hour after
>Eastwood's speech, it already had 20,000 followers. The move spawned a new
>trend with people posting photos of themselves pointing at empty chairs with
>the hashtag "eastwooding." Halimah Abdullah, "Eastwood, the empty chair and
>the speech everyone's talking about," CNN.com (Nexis), Aug. 30, 2012, p not
>given
>
>
>
>Grammatical shifting (): formed from (Clint )Eastwood (born: 1930).
>
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>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org