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

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.

I've ben using "y'all" instead of "guys" the last couple years. When I speak to Republicans, I call them "asswipes."

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

maybe but pronouncing "nuclear" as "nucular" is wrong, sorry.

Ruling on 'NOO-kah-luhr' plz

Iran leadership doesn’t understand the words “nice” or “compassion,” they never have. Sadly, the thing they do understand is Strength and Power, and the USA is by far the most powerful Military Force in the world, with 1.5 Trillion Dollars invested over the last two years alone..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2019

his feelings are hurt bring on the war

he's mad because Hassan Rouhani said the White House was “afflicted by mental retardation.”

Hey Donnie, why don't you take a stab at defining 'nice' and 'compassion' for us, you walking flesh void.

Hassan otm

broke: spending $1.6tn to cancel student debt
woke: spending $1.5tn to murder iranian children

So this latest DoJ file reveals that Duncan Hunter had an affair with at least three different lobbyists, one of his own staff members, and an aide to a member of the GOP leadership team.

— Sam Stein (@samstein) June 25, 2019

the best and the brightest horniest

wow where did he find the time out from his busy schedule of vaping on the floor of congress and enthusiastically committing campaign finance crimes

I look forward to our trillion dollar navy getting sunk by thousands of cheap cruise missiles

A society of the macabre. "Among supporters of the death penalty, support for a nuclear strike [on North Korea] actually rose from 38 percent to 49 percent when the number of expected North Korean fatalities increased from 15,000 to 1.1 million." https://t.co/e8mGvid17h

— Tim Shorrock (@TimothyS) June 25, 2019

we already made a grand gesture of our total indifference to human life by electing Trump tho

We did that by electing Reagan

We did that by electing Reagan Nixon

fixed

nixon andrew jackson

NC lawmaker says Lincoln ‘unjustly invaded’ the South, a ‘sovereign nation’

People in the old Confederate states say that shit all the time. They will never let go of it. The correct rejoinder for that kind of person is to accuse them of not "bearing true allegiance to the United States of America", because that turns the conversation into whether or not they are patriotic Americans and there's no way they won't swear up and down that they're ten times more patriotic than anyone else alive.

here we go again, look the United States has long had a record of invading hostile countries who engage in documented human rights abuses and atrocities so you know they had to put the smackdown on the CSA just like they did Germany, i don't see why this is so hard to understand for guys like that.

One of the failures of the Vietnamese revolution is Meghan McCain. https://t.co/u7N5pDAnOz

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) June 25, 2019

I had a brilliant college physics professor who pronounced nuclear "nucular." There's a good chance he was just trolling, but either way I admired him for it.

he also said "nuculus"

People in the old Confederate states say that shit all the time. They will never let go of it. The correct rejoinder for that kind of person is to accuse them of not "bearing true allegiance to the United States of America", because that turns the conversation into whether or not they are patriotic Americans and there's no way they won't swear up and down that they're ten times more patriotic than anyone else alive.

― A is for (Aimless), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 12:59 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

These people were told by their grade school textbooks that Confederates were a part of a long American patriotic tradition of standing up for their own against an oppressive government, so this argument would sound absurd to them.