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Comment by nosignono

That's not what "dog whistles" are, lol. Dog Whistle means "coded language" basically.

Dog whistles are where someone says something that their audience will understand to mean a specific thing, but will be inaudible or neutral sounding to people who are not in their audience. They are named that because they are like the whistles only dogs can hear, while most people cannot.

"Inner city" is a canonical example of a dog whistle. Where the literal meaning is the districts in a city in the urban center, but is often used to denote poor minority communities. (If the literal meaning is only "city centers", then would you describe Manhattanites as inner city?)

On the left, "tax the rich" might be a dog whistle that carries a similar literal meaning disjoint from the understood meaning within the community.

parent nosignono 1 year ago

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