In Defense of Shaq and Palin
All the pundits are (understandably) having a good time because Sarah Palin said “refudiate.” And I remember back in grad school, the other American in the program and I had a good chuckle when Shaquille O’Neal at a news conference emphasized his answer to a question by saying something like, “Period! P-e-r-o-d, aww, whatever.”
Well I cut people slack for things like this. At the event we just held in Nashville, it was Saturday afternoon and we were doing the final Q&A with the audience. I was running on fumes at that point. I forget what the question was, but in my answer it was actually relevant to refer people to the Krugman music video. I said, “Just go to YouTube and type in ‘bob murphy krugman,’ and that’s spelled…” and then I proceeded to misspell Krugman. (I heard myself saying two ns.) Worse, I started panicking and just punted by saying, “Well, I just misspelled it, you can look it up.”
I truly believe if someone had offered me $20 to spell Krugman at that moment, I would have passed.
