Possible word of the year

[Jonathan Lighter]

Remember when Gary Trudeau routinely depicted G. H. Bush as invisible?

JL

On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 10:00 AM, David Barnhart <dbarnhart at highlands.com>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       David Barnhart <dbarnhart at HIGHLANDS.COM>
> Subject:      Possible word of the year
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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).
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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