unconcession

n.

A statement that retracts a concession.

Example Citation:

"By those standards, the 2000 presidential election was over for about an hour early Wednesday morning -- the interval between when Democratic nominee Al Gore called Republican George W. Bush to concede and when he hit redial and called in his unconcession."

— Ken Herman, "Under pressure from the right, Gore continues constitutional process," Cox News Service, November 10, 2000

Notes:

In the recent U.S. Presidential election imbroglio, chad was the clear linguistic winner, not least because it was recently awarded Word of the Year honors by the American Dialect Society: http://www.americandialect.org. The winner in the Brand-Spanking New category was unconcede, meaning "to rescind a concession." This verb actually proved more popular than the noun unconcession, garnering (by my count) a few more citations over the past couple of months.

Unconcede isn't "brand-spanking new," however. It goes back to 1996 when on election night Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole prematurely sent a concession fax to news organizations and was forced to unconcede:

"The discombobulation of Mr. Dole's campaign was epitomized when the campaign prematurely sent to newsrooms a fax conceding that he had lost. After a flurry of telephone calls, he became the first Presidential candidate in history to unconcede, however temporarily."

— R. W. Apple Jr., "The 1996 Elections: The Presidency," The New York Times, November 6, 1996

Category:

Politics