no, i didn't know that the June 2019 US Politics thread was nasty

I get more annoyed by pols dropping "The American People..." every other sentence

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Monday, June 24, 2019

I thank Bob Dole for teaching me to loathe this phrase.

"Sheeple"

"Humans of [insert geographic region]! I am a [gender classification] you can trust to support you in [government body]! Give me your vote!"

Not to dunk on Alon, but "the only thing this 28 year old Freshman legislator has accomplished is totally changing the national conversation on a half dozen occasions" is a weird criticism https://t.co/Df5IGtVfwJ

— Michael T Sweeney (@mtsw) June 24, 2019

trump just announced sanctions on “ayatollah khOmeini” not sure how effective this will be

Um.

So when is this incredibly fucking stupid timeline supposed to end?

all I know is trump better get those hostages out of the embassy

yikes

the '70s revival is out of hand

i'm hearing about him more and more in all the same places that are talking about Frederick Douglass.

small potatoes but I wish we could permanently ban all politicians from using the word "folks."

― Evans on Hammond (evol j), Monday, June 24, 2019

it especially grated when Obama used it.

I diametrically disagree with this; I never really heard it used before Obama and I liked it coming from him so much that now I use it all the time.

We’re not folks. We’re consumers.

Dubya used "folks" constantly, which along with the Forever Wars and surveillance expansion is why i called O George W Obama.

Sanctioning khomeini makes sense if the recent incidents in Iran happened at the order of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard which is basically his own army and doesn't report into the rest of the Iranian government. So it's better than sanctioning the rest of the country. But they're already doing that too which is probably what caused these incidents to happen in the first place. Trump apparently said yesterday he just doesn't want Iran to pursue nuclear weapons. They're like "WTF that's exactly what we were doing under the agreement that you fucking pulled out of you retard."

An Oct. 30, 2014, analysis of President Obama’s diction by Buzzfeed found that the Commander-in-Chief used the word at least 348 times during presidential news conferences. That’s 7.3 times per 10,000 words. George W. Bush used it about 2.5 times per 10,000 words during his presidency, and Bill Clinton only once per 10,000 words.

https://randomnerds.com/are-politicians-folking-with-us-the-overuse-of-folks-in-todays-political-rhetoric/

xp

akm it's not khomeini

but points taken

v. radical

Slavery reparations is a far-left favorite because it does a number of things.

It reinforces the radical belief that the United States was founded by racist white men who installed a system whereby white guys would run everything and blacks, women and others would be exploited.

— Bill O'Reilly (@BillOReilly) June 24, 2019

billy "stopped clock" o'reilly

the best thing about that is that it positions radicals as the ones who actually know US history

Way cool, rad even, for him to admit this.

Championing traffic lights is a far-left favorite because it does a number of things.

It reinforces the radical belief that automobiles can wreak grievous harm upon people and property if measures aren't taken to control the flow of vehicular traffic.

I mean we're literally at the point where the right is describing observable, measurable constituent reality as 'radical belief'.

slavery reparations is a far-left falafel loofah favorite

re "folks", I have a theory that this is a word black people in America use more often than white people but it is near-impossible to find info on this using the Google searches I've come up with so far

it's a word that was mostly used in Greenwich Village in the '60s iirc

Both of my parents referred to visits with my grandparents as "going to see the folks". It was applied equally to either set of grandparents.

I did find this in my googling adventure which made me go o_O: https://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2019/feb/21/robert-mckinzie/fact-checking-myth-word-picnic-racist/

re "folks", I have a theory that this is a word black people in America use more often than white people but it is near-impossible to find info on this using the Google searches I've come up with so far

― brigadier pudding (DJP), Monday, June 24, 2019 4:22 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it became the new "guys" in tech in literally the last 6-18 months. went from never hearing it to hearing it exclusively, and "guys" sounding like a mild curse word some time then. e.g. at my boring enterprise it is the standard term in (relatively woke) engineering, but has not made it over to sales yet (golf nazis)

at the risk of stating the obvious it's an attempt at "folksiness" which shouldn't be made except in the vernacular around a region or discrete community—neighborhood, church, bingo parlor etc., else (to my ears) it just sounds cloying, pandering/patronizing

we already have a word for people

Folks just makes me think of Ben Vereen in All That Jazz.

I'd happily adopt 'mofos' as a substitution if y'all wanna help me get that off the ground.

I use folks, gang, people, and family to address my staff, for better or worse. fwiw I enjoy this digression considerably more than the news of the day

Some folk'll never eat a skunk
But then again some folk'll

Like Cletus, the slack-jawed mofo.

'comrades' > 'folks' > 'guys' > 'ladies and gentlemen' > 'my fellow americans'

i did the quotes wrong

'youse'

(var. 'youse mugs')

Yinz

we already have a word for people

I often use "folks" in favor of "people" because in certain contexts the word "people" has undergone a degree of pejoration (going from a positive or neutral sense to a negative one)... it feels impersonal and a little too distancing/othering when prefaced by an adjective. This may be no more than the effect of being a default term coming up frequently in speech that calls out a specific subset of the population (usually problematic), and thus a sort of a fall guy word. So I look to substitute it with a softer term. Like "folks". Note that I'm not making any claims about how effective doing so is as an attempt at amelioration; I'm just saying that's one explanation for why we might do it. Also, as a replacement for "guys" it is less gender-specific.

It might be that pejoration is a linguistic phenomenon driven by culture, a different category of language change than something like ignoring the who/whom distinction or pronouncing "nuclear" the way George Bush does (which we assign a cultural value to *after* it arises in the language). We tend to shoot the messenger when it comes to pejoration... this lexical instability is the verbal shadow of some instability in the culture. There's some problem we can't come to grips with, so we're constantly talking around it.

that’s all, y’all!

also “all y’all” is the plural of “y’all,” afaict?

pronouncing "nuclear" the way George Bush does

Historical trivia alert: the first president to consistently mispronounce nuclear as "new-kew-lur" was Dwight Eisenhower.

sometimes “people” works better than “folks”. like: “We tortured some _____.”

"y'all" is plural, "all y'all" just means ALL y'all

a short way of describing the current problem with saying “people” is that it often seems to travel with a preceding silent “you”

My confession to add to all this is that I actually prefer “dudes”

good morning!

Well, to be clear- y’all for second person plural over there; dudes for second person plural over here

Historical trivia alert: the first president to consistently mispronounce nuclear as "new-kew-lur" was Dwight Eisenhower.

It's not a mispronunciation. American and British speakers, for example, pronounce "clientele" in distinct ways. Neither pronunciation is wrong.

People think "y'all" can be used in the singular because it sometimes gets used to refer to an entity or a group when conversing with one member of that group. For example, when I worked at a bookstore, people talking to me would ask me "can y'all take this back if I don't like it?" They're talking to me, but referring to the bookstore which I am a part of. A third party less familiar with "y'all" overhearing that might assume they were using it as the second person singular.

Far more entertaining if you come from a y'all-free zone is the possessive form, which sometimes is realized as "y'all'ses" (yall-ziz) and always makes me happy when I hear it in the wild.