John of Aix wrote:
> message de news: BCC658EA.457F9%gnarlodiousNULL@VOID.invalid.yahoo.com...
>
>>I've noticed lately the word "folks" is undergoing a drastic change of
>>meaning in my lifetime. I hear it used by talk radio,TV hosts and even
>>George Bush in the exact opposite way it was traditionally used.
>>
>>Traditionally:
>>simple people, parents, kin, neighbors, peasants, landsman, countryman
>>
>>
>>Modern:
>>"They need to extract information from these folks" (terrorists)
>>"These folks are on death row for 20 years now" (prisoners)
>>"The folks at Walt Disney..." (CEO's)
>>"a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who
>>committed this act" (terrorists)
>>
>>What's going on with this word? Is "Folk Music" now "Terrorist Music"? Is
>
> it
>
>>an insidious propaganda campaign to deprive us of the comfort of "folks"
>
> and
>
>>leave us parentless, kinless and neighborless? An attack on the traditions
>>of language preparing us for the a New American Century?
>
>
> Well it has come simply to mean 'people' as you show. Perhaps one of the
> reasons is to put a friendly tone into what would otherwise be an unfriendly
> statement by hinting at a familiar, avuncular concern.
Well, that's the point. It tends to have a new meaning, indeed. Most of
the words are likely to suffer from such changes when they are used with
high frequency. This is also a valid argument concerning the
pronunciation of very commong words. This is also true about
orthographic changes.
--
Julien
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