A Common Language

I really like this piece Mr. Sefton linked to in the early morning thread. The author has a great observation as to why the left's 24/7 anti-Trump jihad is falling mostly on deaf ears. It's because

...most of their stuff is shouted out in language which doesn’t mean much to the natives of Brooklyn, Peoria or Biloxi. Not because they don’t know the definition of the words they’re hearing but because they rarely, very rarely, use them. I spent thirty years in manufacturing, I go to gun club meetings, American Legion meetings, I chat at the post office in the morning, I go to church and church affairs and have friends. But in all these years of mixing, I’ve only heard the word 'fascist' used by a man railing against his wife. Ditto for 'misogynist,' 'xenophobe,' 'Islamophobe' or 'homophobe'.

Contrast this with

The simple Anglo-Saxon terms Donald Trump used to describe Hillary – “liar,” “corrupt,” “crooked,” “nasty,” resonated with middle America where the East and West Coast Liberal inside-the-bubble-talk that Hillary and her advocates used to describe Trump drew a blank. And so went the election.

Exactly. If I want to insult some douche-y guy, I'll say 'you homo', not 'you homophobe'.

And he points out that the epithet 'nazi' pretty much gets used to describe a person who is extremely dogmatic about one thing or another.

For example, years ago when my children were young, Mrs. Muse and I ran across the La Leche League, a group that promotes breast-feeding of infants. And while that's great and and healthy and all, some of their members can get pretty strident about it, and after awhile I got tired of their constant harangues that implied that if a mother wasn't breast-feeding her babies, she must be a bad person. So I started referring to them as "nipple nazis".

But I never called them "literally Hitler."

Open Thread, heh, maybe I can set a record for most time stomped.

posted by OregonMuse at 04:15 PM

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