Saturday, February 28, 2009

Freepin' wingers

The future is unknown,* but for the moment, C-PAC is a gathering of fringe crazies, and the subject of near-infinite hilarious posts by snarky bloggers, like here for example. If you follow that kind of stuff, you're seeing a lot of forms of freep these days. That's a blend, from Free Republic, the classic tinfoil hat crowd on-line, as suggested already by this google search result:

Both the Obama 'birth certificate' issue AND the 'homosexual agenda'. Isn't that a scream? Of course it's more than a little scary to think that they could have real power, so I laugh only nervously.

But I knew freep and its derivational family only as negative terms. Most common, in my experience, is freeper, synonym for wingnut, etc. But the verb is out there too, as here:
To slew [skew? V] or cheat an online poll by repeatedly voting (clearing cookies, using proxies) or to make a blog appear to be commented by numerous posters by the same means. (From the practices of the Free Republic or "freepers")
The results of the CNN question of the day were running 70:30 in favor until an hour ago when it got freeped.
What surprised me was seeing that the FreeRepublic website actually uses the term, with the variant spelling FReeper. Somehow, that's worse, because it evokes 'reaper' and thus 'grim' for me.

*That is …

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ahhhhh, Unknown Hinson ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGj_ZbN5Lpg

Thing is, the Freepers are weirder than him!

Anonymous said...

I like that this sound like 'freak', etc. Fits especially good.

Anonymous said...

I think "slew" (also "slue") makes sense in this context. One of its definitions (from Merriam Webster Online, etymology unknown) is "to cause to skid: veer". I know it from aviation, where it refers to causing an aircraft to slip sideways so that it moves in a direction other than its true heading. Thus, crosswinds can slew your plane off course, and freepers can slew a poll away from the (to them) inconvenient truth.

Mr. Verb said...

Thanks. And you're right: maybe I was too quick to dismiss that possibility ... but that just doesn't seem like the usual level of vocabulary on Urban Dictionary.