Akademik

n.

A person who studies or is fascinated by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

—Palintology n.

Remember back in the 1990s when Hillary Clinton described herself as the Rorschach test for how people felt about the women's movement? Palin has become the latest test for shifting common ground and fault lines between sisterhood and sibling rivalry. It's been like this since the Palintologists discovered her in Alaska and put her on the national ticket of the Grand Old (Boy) Party.

—Ellen Goodman, " Lipstick on a rogue: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/11/20/lipstick_on_a_rogue/," The Boston Globe, November 20, 2009

Gov. Jennifer Granholm said Friday her impression of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, as Granholm helped Sen. Joe Biden prepare for Thursday night's vice presidential debate, was nowhere near as dead-on as the performance by Tina Fey on "Saturday Night Live" the last couple of weeks. ...

"But I studied her debates, her language, her passions and areas of expertise ... and pretty well captured the arguments she made. I took it very seriously and tried to be as close to the real thing as possible.

"I became a Palintologist," she quipped.

—Mark Hornbeck, "Granholm became a 'Palintologist'," The Detroit News, October 4, 2008

Also, much of the success of the Palin Movement comes from the tireless efforts of Elephantman, whom people used to call "crazy," but who now looks crazy-like-a-fox. He reached out to palintologist (http://palintologist.com/), a person with superb blogging skills, and she's now a key player in this effort.

—Stephen R. Maloney, " Bloggers 4 Palin: Making History: http://camp2008victorya.blogspot.com/2007/07/bloggers-4-palin-making-history.html," Campaign2008VictoryA, July 10, 2007

The domain name palintologist.com (now apparently offline) was first registered: http://www.whois.net/whois/palintologist.com on July 1, 2007.