Possible word of the year

David Barnhart dbarnhart at HIGHLANDS.COM
Sat Sep 1 14:00:53 UTC 2012


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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