"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
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. 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
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