Dogwhistles and Other Fig Leaves

Carrie and Megan talk with Dr Robert Henderson, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, about his newest book (with Dr Elin Mccready), Signaling without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles.

• Botanical taxonomy
• Common names of birds

Transcript

Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. 

Megan Figueroa: I'm Megan Figueroa.

Carrie: And I'm Carrie Gillon.

Megan: Hey, I'm glad to see that you're up and not sick anymore.

Carrie: Yeah, I'm finally not sick. I finally stopped coughing a few days ago.

Megan: That sounds good.

Carrie: It's been nice.

Megan: It's been nice enough not to have a cough, I bet.

Carrie: Yes. Of course, that means I am absolutely having to wear a mask again, which I was, but not as much as I should have been, but now I'm back to pandemic mode. And now the Mpox is coming...

Megan: I saw that.

Carrie: ...so it's a good idea to wear a mask. Today we're talking to someone that we actually know about dog whistles. But here's something that's kind of adjacently related.

Megan: Okay, I'm ready.

Carrie: From Smithsonian Magazine, botanists vote to remove racial slur from hundreds of plant species names.

Megan: One racial slur?

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: Okay. 

Carrie: It's a slur? I didn't know it was a slur. So like, again, sort of related to dog whistles. Have you ever heard of this slur? Caffra?

Megan: No, I've never heard that.

Carrie: No? Me either. 

Megan: And it's the Latin name of a ton of?

Carrie: A ton of plants. So the Kei apple tree, which I've never heard of before, Dovyalis Caffra. But now it's going to be renamed to Dovyalis afra.

Megan: So getting rid of the 'K'?

Carrie: 'C,' but yes.

Megan: Oh, 'C,' yeah. 

Carrie: K sounds written with a 'C'. I apologize for saying it over and over again because it doesn't feel like a slur to me because I don't know it. It's easier to say. So I apologize. But this slur, you'll never guess where it comes from.

Megan: Like, from what part of the world?

Carrie: Yeah. What part of the world? Or what country? Or what regime?

Megan: USSR.

Carrie: Interesting. No. Apartheid era in South Africa.

Megan: Okay. All right.

Carrie: Yeah, I did not know.

Megan: No. See, this is where context is so important.

Carrie: Well, this is why slurs are not inherently bad. They're only bad because of how they're used and the context they come from, right? So if you don't have that context, they're just a word.

Megan: Yeah. I took a TESL class for grammar for syntax or something, if you remember that class at ASU, or grammar for TESL, sorry. And one of the students was from China, and she said the N-word over and over again in a question. She said it so easily, and it's like, she has no context like we do in the United States. Well, she knew it because she was asking the question, like, "Why is it bad?" But for her to be able to say that, she didn't have the same cultural backage that we do.

Carrie: Probably not. For us, we're just little babies when it comes to this word, it really has no meaning. So apparently, this is the very first time taxonomists have voted in favor of changing offensive scientific names. So like baby steps, we're moving forward.

Megan: Yeah. Because you know there's got to be more. There's kind of much more.

Carrie: I assume. Like, speaking of the N word, there's still place names with the N word in it.

Megan: Oh my god, really?

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: See, that's a problem.

Carrie: Or another slur, squaw, is in a bunch of place names too.

Megan: Yeah, that's true. They changed the one in Phoenix, though.

Carrie: They did change the one in Phoenix around the time I moved there. I was like, "Okay, things are getting better here."

Megan: Yeah, absolutely.

Carrie: And in some ways they were, and in some ways, ooh, not so much.

Megan: All right. But yeah, this is the first time that's really interesting.

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: 2024. Good for those people, for those partners.

Carrie: Yes. So it was initiated by Gideon Smith and Estrella Figueiredo, who are both plant taxonomists at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, and they have spent years campaigning for this. It makes sense that there'd be people from South Africa, particularly from Nelson Mandela University.

Megan: Yeah, that makes sense.

Carrie: Yeah, because they're the ones who are really going to know and be harmed by it.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely.

Carrie: So the same day, they also voted on another proposal, but brought forward by Kevin Teal, I think, who's a plant taxonomist from Australian National University, and he suggested a broad rule to permit the modification of any offensive species names, but the measure was watered down. So now you can flag them, but they're not allowed to consider names given before 2026, which seems silly to me. Flagging them is a first step. Sometimes you have to do this groundwork before you can do the bigger thing.

Megan: Right. So it doesn't go into effect until 2026?

Carrie: No. Their names given before 2026 are not allowed to be reconsidered.

Megan: Okay. Except they did the caffra.

Carrie: Right. Because I guess it was just that bad. I assume it's as bad as the N-word is to us, but I don't know. I'm just making that assumption. So I could see how that one would be like, "You know what? We're going to do this one." [inaudible] 

Megan: I almost feel bad for using it. I don't feel the same way.

Carrie: It doesn't have the same charge for us, right? So last year, I didn't hear about this, the American Ornithological Society changed some English names of birds, not the scientific ones.

Megan: That's good. I don't know where they're slurs. 

Carrie: So some of them were named after people, but also some of them were offensive or exclusionary. There's a group of 70 to 80 species that primarily inhabit the US and Canada.
There's a prairie bird named for the Confederate General, John P. McCown.

Megan: Okay, so they changed that.

Carrie: They were not going to rename it. They voted against it in 2019, but then in 2020, they went back and said, "Never mind, we're going to call it the thick-billed long spur."

Megan: That's better anyway.

Carrie: In the end, the birds won't care what ornithologists just decided to call them. "Names are important for humans."

Megan: That's true. Birds don't care. They won't know.

Carrie: Chris Cooper, the birder in Central Park, he's mentioned in this article.

Megan: Oh, that's great.

Carrie: Anyway, I don't see an example of the offensive ones, so maybe they're too offensive, to even mention. I don't know.

Megan: Yeah, fair enough. 

Carrie: Off the top of my head, I can't think of any bird names that are offensive.

Megan: I don't know very many bird names, I guess.

Carrie: Unless you think tit or booby are offensive.

Megan: Right. Some people do.

Carrie: I can get it. I can understand. Did you know that there's a brown beetle named after Adolf Hitler?

Megan: What? No. Did they change his name?

Carrie: Not yet, no.

Megan: Not yet, okay. 

Carrie: So the birds are the only ones, and those are only the English names that have been changed. Scientific names have not changed yet.

Megan: So it's kind of a big deal that the [inaudible] should change these Latin names. Scientific names.

Carrie: It is a big deal. So it'll be interesting to see what else ends up changing over time, and whether animal names and bird names get changed too, or if it's just plants. We'll see. 

Megan: Very interesting.

Carrie: Yeah, it's kind of fun.

Megan: Yeah, very cool. And it does fit right into what we talk about today. But first, Patreon.

Carrie: But first, Patreon. So first, we would like to thank Annemarie Trester, a former guest for becoming a patron.

Megan: Yes. Thank you so much.

Carrie: Yeah. I'd like to encourage you, if you're able, to support us at www.patreon.com/vocalfriespod. But we have to warn you that Apple will start charging fees in the iOS app, so if you're using this, it's only for new memberships, so if you're already using it, don't worry. But if you like to pay for your memberships through your Apple iOS, or an app, you might want to do it on the website instead, because then you're not getting the extra 30% taxed. 

Megan: Yeah. So you can go straight to the website and get it done there. And Patreon has an app too, or is that where you're saying it's going to be?

Carrie: That's what I'm saying. 

Megan: Oh, the Patreon app? 

Carrie: Don't do it through any app on Apple. Just do it through the website. If you're on a different OS, you're fine. So if you're on Android, it's not going to affect you. But on Apple, it is going to affect you. So I would just stay away from it personally. Anyway, thank you everyone who does support us. And reminder, there are stickers and bonus episodes and mugs. 

Megan: So many bonus episodes. 

Carrie: Yes, a lot. Yeah. You can join us there if you wish. Today we're talking about dog whistles, so we hope you enjoy.

[music]

Carrie: So today we're so excited to have Dr. Robert Henderson, who is a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona with appointments in cognitive science and second language acquisition and teaching. His research is in formal semantics with a special focus on the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, especially mine[?] languages. But he's here today because he's also the co-author of "Signaling Without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles" with Elin McCready. So welcome. 

Megan: We're so excited you're here.

Dr. Robert Henderson: Hey, good to see y'all. 

Carrie: It's always fun to have someone on that we know. 

Megan: Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Robert: Does it make it better? Maybe it makes it more awkward. I don't know. I feel like I'm in a formal scenario with my friends. 

Carrie: It's not formal. 

Megan: No, not formal. Don't worry about it.

D: It's not formal. 

Megan: Yeah, we're casual. 

D: Okay. We're casual. 

Carrie: So why did you want to write this book and why now?

D: Yeah, so the book is called "Signaling Without Saying" and it's sort of about covert communication, so signals that you might be sending without sort of saying them in a canonical way. And really the focus is on dog whistles, which we think of as sort of bits of language that send one message to what you might think of as like an in-group, and then out-group members sort of don't hear the dog whistle. They don't get the meaning that you're trying to send them. That's why they're called dog whistles. We imagine like the whistle that the dogs can hear, but other people, other beings cannot hear it.
 
The reason why we're interested in this topic is for two sort of topical reasons. So one is sort of the formal semantics than pragmatic literature has gotten very interested in lots of different kinds of meaning. So we learned an intro sort of semantics that we have sort of presuppositions and implicatures and sort of at issue, truth-conditional meaning of our utterances. But people have started to, and these are all different, they behave differently. People have started to look at other kinds of expressions and have argued that there may be different kinds of meanings like honorifics, just [inaudible] languages with sort of honorific systems like Japanese or slurs, epithets, this kind of things. So one question is, the dog whistle right sends this meaning to the people who can hear the dog whistle. And the question is what kind of meaning is that? Is it like an implicature? Is it like a slur, et cetera? So, one of the main questions and sort of a theoretically interesting one because this is topical. People want to apologize what kinds of meanings there are. And the question is where do dog whistles fit into that? 

Additionally, we thought that it was a good time to write this book because there's been kind of a political turn, especially philosophy of language literature. There's a lot of work out there, recent work that's asking how is language used to do politics or political things. There's work by Jason Stanley on ideology, there's work by Jennifer Saul on fig leaves and there's dog whistles as well. So yeah, there's a lot of philosophers of language doing political stuff these days. And so we thought our book was timely for the philosophy literature, but also for the linguistic literature. 

Carrie: Oh, 100%. 

Megan: Yeah, absolutely.

Carrie: So what is, is a fig leaf just the same thing as a dog whistle or is it slightly different?

Dr. Robert: Yeah. Fig leaves are sort of similar and you're trying to cover your tracks, basically. You're trying to present some information to your interlocutor while giving yourself a way out. And dog whistles might be one way of doing that but there are other ways. I was just joking. 

Carrie & Megan: Okay. 

Megan: Why are dog whistles interesting to study?

 Well, I think dog whistles are interesting to study. I mentioned before for just sort of basic questions about what languages are like. We want to apologize what kinds of meanings exist. That's one reason why they're interesting. Another reason in particular based on our work and our proposal for how dog whistles work is that we think that dog whistles implicate social meaning for the kind of meaning that you express that has been studied, most prominently in sociolinguistics. So, your aspects of not just eating your linguistic presentation, but also how you dress, how you interact sends messages to the person you're talking to about your sort of sociolinguistic persona.

And so a big part of our work is arguing that dog whistles really implicate this avenue of meaning. Communication of sociolinguistic persona. And so it's a particularly cool topic because it brings together semantics pragmatics for them, also sociolinguistics, which maybe haven't spent enough time together. And we think that there should be more and more work looking at the intersection between those two fields. 

Megan: Absolutely.

Carrie: How can we spot dog whistles? And are they sometimes more difficult to spot for some people? And if so, why?

Dr. Robert:  Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, dog whistles I mentioned before, like fig leaves give you a way to sort of cover, your traps conversationally and speaking. And so dog whistles are particularly good at this because they are very deniable. That makes them hard to sort of determine whether someone is using a dog whistle or not. Their primary function is to be covert and deniable. And so they would be difficult to detect, for different kinds of people. And that goes to sort of the core of our analysis.

So here's what we want to say is happening with dog whistles. In our theory, they're essentially going to be sort of markers of a sociolinguistic persona. And you detect them because you're familiar with how people who have that persona talk. So you have some sort of in-group language. Maybe you sort of are familiar with how people in our in-group talk, then when I use that expression, you will recognize who I am presenting to the world, my persona that I'm presenting to the world, in a way that a person who's not familiar with that rhetoric or that in-group structure, they will not be able to tell. You're more able to detect dog whistles if you are more familiar with how large varieties of different groups communicate. You have to kind of be familiar with lots of rhetoric that will make you good at detecting dog whistles. And the less you're familiar with that, then the more likely you'll miss things. And in some cases, that might just be hopeless. You might not be able to have access to those communities. 

Carrie: Right. The way you just talked about it now made me think, could there be dog whistles that are neutral to good? When I think of dog whistles, I think of them more as a bad thing. But this could be a code where you're just signaling who you are, but it's not in a mysterious way. 

Dr. Robert: Oh, no, 100%. And in fact, we're kind of maybe even appropriating the term or maybe over-applying the term dog whistles. There's different things that people have said. So in the political science literature in particular, they make a very clear distinction being what they call a dog whistle and what they call a multivocal appeal. A multivocal appeal is exactly what I said before. I send a message, and different groups of people receive that message differently. So That's what's called multivocalism. I'm saying multiple things at once to different audiences. And of course, this has been studied in political communication. This is something politicians have to do. And this is why this is very political because what is a person who speaks to a large, diverse audience and needs everyone to like them? Well, that's a politician, right? So you need to find ways of sending messages that lots of different groups will hear differently and take what you want them to take from it. 

So in the political science literature, they say a multivocal appeal that you would deny, that's a dog whistle. If you wouldn't deny it, then you're doing what you normally do, communicating to lots of audiences. The problem is dog whistles is such a good term. So in our book, we apply it to all of these phenomena. So I don't think dog whistles are necessarily bad. In our framework, any of these sort of covert messages is signal without saying directly whether positive or negative is for us a dog whistle. 

A canonical example of this, there is a lot of work in the political science literature about George Bush, the second one, who was evangelical and would often use evangelical coded language that perhaps people would not be aware of. In these cases, we talk about in the book, which has been studied in the political science literature, is in a State of the Union address where he mentioned the wonder-working power of the faith of the American people. Wonder-working power is a direct quote from a hymn called, 'There's wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb.' If you're not familiar with that hymn, you would not recognize this phrase. But if you were an evangelical Christian, you probably sung this hymn in church before and you would be like, "Oh, he's one of us." If you were to go to George Bush and be like, "Well, are you evangelical?" He'd say, "Yes, of course." That was a major part of his identity. He wouldn't deny it. And he wouldn't say, "I'm sending secret messages." He's just saying, you're just talking how he talks. But for us, that would still be like a dog whistle. You're sending a message to a community that will hear it that other people don't recognize. 

Carrie: Oh, yeah. That's a really good example. I definitely 100% would not get that. Like I knew he was evangelical.

Megan: Yeah, I wouldn't either.

Carrie: Obviously not a surprise, but I don't have access to that community.

Dr. Robert: There's a really nice paper by Albertson. You're going to look it up. I forgot the year, but it studies how people react to that dog whistle. In fact, part of the subgroups in the study were evangelicals who thought that religious appeals and political speech were good and those that thought it were bad. So people thought that we should have a more secular presentation in our political discourse. Both those groups of evangelicals detected the dog whistle. Some people thought that made them like George Bush Moore and other ones thought that a politician needed that they would [inaudible] less. 

Carrie: Interesting. 

Dr. Robert: Even people who hear the dog whistle, even if it's towards them, might have different views on whether we should talk like that. Or whether you should send those messages in a certain discourse.

Carrie: That's so fascinating. 

Megan: I can't help but think of Donald Trump. I feel like he is someone who dog whistles a lot. 

Dr. Robert: Yeah. 

Megan: Do you think that that is a true assessment of him? 

Dr. Robert: Yeah. We talk about this in a chapter in the book about trust. I think this is maybe a good place to talk about it. There's a lot of work particularly, in the philosophy literature about when should you trust first-person testimony. If someone tells you something, when should you believe them or when is it rational to believe something someone is telling you? One property people have discussed is, well, if it's true, it's cracking. If they're telling you true things, then the next time they tell you something, you should believe them because their statements are true, it's cracking. Donald Trump is a person who has been criticized a lot for saying untrue things, but people still seem to trust him and have faith in him. So one of the questions we have in the book is, well, why? And it's not just him. A lot of politicians lie. A lot of politicians speak untruthfully or maybe strategically, but why would we trust an interlocutor who was, especially non-truths cracking? Why should people trust this person?

Well, one reason in our theory, one thing that language can do is send a signal about who you are sociolinguistically, what is your sociolinguistic persona? And so, if you're a person who says maybe things that are false, like in terms of corresponding to facts in the world, but are highly informative about who you are, like what group you're a member of, well, then you can build rapport, you can build trust. One way of doing this is to say, "I'm going to use a bunch of dog whistles, I'm going to use in-group language, and my people are going to hear that and then know that I'm one of them, even if it's facts of what I'm saying or not the case." And so I think that is a style of political communication that can be very effective, as we may see.

Carrie: Yeah, it's definitely effective. I hadn't really considered how it was working, but it seems to me what you're saying is like, "I'm telling you a truth about myself even while I'm lying." 

Dr. Robert: Yeah. I think once again, this is very effective, especially for political communication because you're trying to build sort of social units. And so, being like, "I'm on your team," is a very powerful message. And one way to do that is by sending dog whistles, by communicating messages that only a certain group hears. And in fact, this is true even, people know this from the advertising literature as well. Here's a fact that's interesting. If you watch a commercial, and you realize that that commercial is not for you, like you're not the target audience, you will dislike that commercial and the product. If you realize that, "Oh, this commercial is being targeted to these other people and I'm not in that group," you get mad. On average, people dislike it. So it's better for it to be mutual. It's better for you to think, "Oh, this is a commercial for me, but whatever, I don't care about the product," but then secretly in the commercial, there's a dog whistle that the true audience of the commercial will get and be like, "Oh, this commercial is for me and I like these guys."

So this is exactly what dog whistles are, doing political communication as well. You want to send a message that maybe other people don't hear, but you're in-group people, people you really want to target are realizing, "Oh, that guy's talking to me." And then you will double your likes for that person. That is a strategy that you can use. And even if you're just saying whatever, you're just lying, you're still able to communicate successfully by giving people information about who you are as a sociolinguistic speaker, like as an interlocutor.

Carrie: Oh my God, that's so fascinating. I totally have had that exact feeling of, "I hate this so much for me." I don't think I've realized that's what I was doing, but I've definitely felt it. 

Megan: Yeah, definitely while watching commercials, for sure. And I didn't even think, but of course, dog whistles are used in commercials and in advertising. 

Dr. Robert: Oh yeah. 100%.

Megan: That makes a lot of sense. 

Dr. Robert: Yeah. There's even a good New York Times article, you can dig it up, I think Subaru was sending dog whistles to lesbians in a bunch of advertisements in the 90s, in particular, surrounding Xena, the warrior princess. 

Megan: Oh my goodness.

Dr. Robert: For instance, they had a Subaru commercial advertisement and the license plate was  'XENA LVR'. I guess this is the TV show in the 90s?

Carrie: Yeah. 90s.

Dr. Robert: Something like this. That was very big in the lesbian community. The average person doesn't even know, sees the thing, not realizing that the advertisement, it's not for them. But if you're particularly a Xena lover, you're like, "Oh, this is me. This is my car. I love these. I love this brand."  This New York Times article was a retrospective and they're talking with an advertising agent for Subaru. We're like, "Oh, this was incredibly calculated."

Carrie: As someone who loved Xena in the 90s, it's a great show. And it was a target. 

Megan: That kind of targeting seems pretty innocuous to me, but it can be pretty harmful, right? Dog whistles. 

Dr. Robert: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Anything can be dangerous in a few different ways. So one thing we talk about in the book, even just on a meta-level, is covert, right? So when you're doing it, you're in some sense being dishonest to members of the audience. You're doing the communicative events. You are communicating and you're specifically doing something that some of your listeners are not going to get, and you're doing it on purpose. So you're pulling the wool over their eyes. And so already that's like deceptive. We have a chapter in the book where we talk about possible, like what we call a communication breakdown. Imagine you're in a scenario where you think people are sending dog whistles that you don't know. You believe that there's a lot of dog whistling going on. You can be like, "That's a dog whistle." And we call this hypervigilance. It can cause a situation where people can't communicate or at least make communication very difficult because it's distrustful. People think people are being deceptive on all sides. So, it can sort of on a meta-level, poison the communication discourse. I guess that's the word. It can poison the discourse.

Additionally, they can be used to radicalize people, in-group and in the sense of there's this phrase that people like to talk about a lot now, like being too online. I think the way people use it like, "Oh, you're familiar with memes, you're familiar with things that are hyper-specific," aspects of the discourse that maybe a normal person is not aware of. And I think that is a real phenomenon. You might be online, you know about all the memes, what they mean, and you and your friends or your interlocutors go down this spiral of more and more in-group language, and you want to one-up the person. You want to do the next most transgressive thing or find the bleeding edge of the communicative of the discourse. I think you can spiral into saying more extreme things or being in sort of more extreme subgroups who really get the joke.

Carrie: Yeah, for Chan. 

Dr. Robert: Exactly. Like these message boards, people trying to one-up each other and do the next, find the next, mine the next meme, vein of meme in the mine.

Megan: So they can be harmful too because just the meaning of some of these dog whistles could be slurs, right? 

Dr. Robert: Yeah. Or we want to say we don't think that dog whistles are slurs themselves, particularly because slurs have this property of being not deniable in the same way. But, we do think that what dog whistles can do is they can be part of rhetorics that are racist, for instance, like to get back to slurring, right? So there is very good work on this. I think it's Mendelberg. Yeah, there's a book. I hope that's right. I think it's Mendelberg. There's this book that talks about American political rhetoric in particular, there's a kind of norm with equality. People should talk as if we believe in equality. But, there's been a lot of racism in US political history and in the present. So how do you balance these two things? How do you as a politician, for instance, seem like you're upholding the norm of equality while also perhaps signaling to certain constituencies that you're okay with the status quo with respect to race, gender, or whatever? That's a place where dog whistles fit and allows you to do that. You can say things that on the surface seem maybe like the gravity quality or, maybe are deniable. And then you signal to a sub-audience that you're really okay with like status quo in terms of whatever axis you're talking about.

Carrie: Can you give an example of that kind of dog whistle? 

Dr. Robert: Yeah. One that we talked about in the book, maybe in the first few pages, is one from Paul Ryan when he was a representative and he talks about people in Milwaukee, he refers to as the inner-city. He's like, "People in our inner cities don't have a culture of work." Barbara Lee, a fellow representative, called him out and said, "This is a thinly veiled racial attack," because inner-city is a signal; African American communities, urban African American communities, or urban black communities. And so what you hear is black neighborhoods don't have a culture of work, as opposed to inner-city. And then when you call them out on it, you're like, "No, I don't mean inner-city, I didn't mean like in Milwaukee, like in the city." Maybe like in the United States, there's often political polarization around rural versus urban areas. You can one hand say, "Well, it's really about the city," but really the message you're sending, it's about maybe different racial groups. So that's an example, like inner-city.

Another really good example is that it's been tested in political science work, our dog whistles concerning welfare. So there's this conception that only certain communities, minority communities make use of welfare. Actually, when you present people an op-ed that discusses increasing funding for welfare versus assistance to the poor, respondents particularly white respondents in these surveys are more likely to support assistance to the poor than welfare. Even though they're denotationally equivalent, they mean the same thing semantically. But one of them has extra connotations. These racial connotations seem to have polarized people around whether they're willing to support it. So yeah, absolutely. Words can definitely be used to manipulate political opinion along racial lines.

Megan: I wonder, do you think recent, Donald Trump saying that immigrants are taking black jobs, is that a dog whistle? Black jobs? Because I gathered he was meaning low-paying jobs. 

Dr. Robert: I'd have to think about how we'd analyze that. I can tell you in our analysis, you really want to say that there's two kinds of dog whistles, one that are called enriching dog whistles. And the other one, what do we even call the other one? I just wrote this book. There's the enriching one and then there's the other one. Okay. Well, the other one, you only signal things about your own persona. So you use wonder-working power and, what does wonder-working power mean? It means power that works wonders. It's just semantically transparent, but then you signal who you are. I'm the kind of person who says wonder-working power, meaning I'm like an evangelical because I know this term. Alternatively, [crosstalk].

Carrie: Identifying?

Dr. Robert: Identifying. That's what we call them. Because you're primarily identifying yourself. And then we just talked about inner-city. Well, inner-city has maybe a neutral, like a compositional semantic meaning. Maybe like the inner part of the city, but then it has this enriching meaning, meaning maybe like black communities in the city under a stereotypical view of them. That is sort of the enrichments. And the question is, where does that enrichment come from? And it comes from what we want to say that comes via identifying. So it says something like, "I'm the speaker who would use inner-city. I'm the kind of person who would use that in this context." That signals that I might hold a certain ideology. And in that ideology, it is taken as true that in the inner-city, it's the place where black people live and they have a certain form of life there. Like maybe under this racialized conception of it. So the enrichment comes from sort of the ideology associated with the persona in question. 

So maybe in this case of black jobs, it could be a dog whistle in that kind of terms where it's linked to an ideology who sees black people as serving a certain function in society of doing certain kinds of jobs. And so you kind of get to the enriching, like, "Oh, what does he really mean there through the connection to an ideology?"  So it could be like the enriching dog whistle case.

Carrie: Yeah. It must be. It just feels so like 1950s to me. It's just an old version of that particular kind of racial view. I don't know. 

Dr. Robert: It does make sense. I mean, so part of what we are saying is that, okay, let me think of sociolinguistics in general, right? We all have sociolinguistic personas. We all speak a certain way. And if you're a person who's older, for instance, you were formed in the 50s or 60s, right? Sure. Your ways of speaking and your presentation are going to be, you know, partially affected by those times, right? Um, those ways of speaking, that'll be, you know, rhetorics that you are familiar with and you will go back to because that's how you speak. It's also signaling that the interlock here is being, you know, of a certain generation, right? Which is part of their sociolinguistic persona. 

Megan: That makes sense. So different generations have different ways of using dog whistles. Is that true? 

Dr. Robert: I wouldn't necessarily say that we have different dog whistles, right? 

Megan: Okay. They have different dog whistles.

Dr. Robert: They have different ones, right? And maybe I have different ways of using them. I'm sure that I dog whistle as well in the sense of sending covert messages based on in-group. I'm a big chess player. You might know based on saddle [inaudible], conversationally dropped in-group lingo. I think if you're an older politician, you're going to say things that are going to flag you as that, particularly the people who are aware of those older rhetorics. 

Megan: And the older rhetorics could even be like from 10 years ago. 

Dr. Robert: One hundred percent.

Megan: I'm thinking of like, using the word like illegals, I would never use that. And when people do use it, it signals to me a specific ideology.

Dr. Robert: One hundred percent. Yeah. Some of this is, it can be cases where it's maybe not even nefarious. Like there's some term, like say illegals, I don't know the history of this, but maybe in the past, it was more neutral, right? 

Megan: Right. 

Dr. Robert: And then people realize it's like, "Oh, that's so fucked up. Maybe we shouldn't say that." If you're part of the conversation of people being like, "Yeah, that doesn't have great connotations. Let's switch it up." You're going to change your use and the people who are not part of that discussion or who maybe that discussion didn't reach will not know it. I think you could use that phrase. You can use it innocently in the sense of you don't know that you're signaling that you were not part of this conversation that really reappraised the use of that term, which is information in itself, but then you could also use it sort of cynically to signal to people, "Oh, I'm one of those people who think that that conversation should not have happened." In fact, it can be used aggressively in that sense.

Carrie: It's true. Although I do have a theory about adjectives being used as nouns, they sound inherently bad. Females, blacks, illegals. But maybe not everybody has that same feeling. 

Dr. Robert: No, there's work on this essentializing language. There's sort of, you are identifying a person in virtue of a characteristic.

Carrie: But it is interesting though, because it's an English thing. French does it all the time and it's just a normal thing. Like [inaudible].

Dr. Robert: Interesting. That's a great point. I'd be interested to actually look at the history of usage in English. It could be like a similar thing kind of happened where at some point there's a discussion or there's a switch and saying, we should not use the adjectival forms and then using them then signals that you're just against all these people who want to do that. Like you're identifying yourself as not part of that people, so it could be a sociomorphic fact and not necessarily a strictly, [inaudible] of course. 

Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. Very cool. 

Megan: Speaking of different languages, does your analysis fit with any language? It's just that the dog whistles will be different. 

Dr. Robert: Yeah, totally. We didn't talk about other languages in the book and we partially added ignorance. I was recently approached by someone who said that they had read the book there in Israel and had read it as part of a reading group in Israel and people were like, "Oh, yeah, this happens in the Hebrew too." Of course, it generated discussion about dog whistles and their own sort of language and also in their own cultural context. So, I one hundred percent [inaudible] applicable everywhere. Actually, because sociolinguistics is obviously applicable everywhere and our count is very sociolinguistic-based. So, we need for dog whistles to emerge for there to be sociolinguistic personas like variation and sociolinguistic persona in a community. And then differential knowledge about what are the linguistic signals of those personas. I know that a certain expression goes with those people and you don't. Bad. Where a dog whistle is available. So that's all you need, which is going to be universal.

Carrie: You also talked a little bit about epithets and honorifics. How are they different or related?

Dr. Robert: Yeah. That's a very good question and we have some arguments in the book about this. I think what we want to say is that for honorifics, epithets, slurs, this meaning to the side; the side meaning is really part of the dictionary definition as part of the semantic content of the expression. Let's use the slur that we're allowed to use, 'Kraut,' right? For Germans. So 'Kraut', one means German and the other means 'I don't like Germans.' So, you say, "I don't like Kraut food," means, "I don't like German food." And then to it on the side, it says, "I have a disposition towards German people."  So we want to say that if you don't know that Kraut means you don't like Germans, you are somehow like not learned English. You need to know that it's a slur, part of it's like dictionary definition. 

In contrast, a phrase like inner-city. That might be approaching that lexicalization, especially in US and of English, but you can imagine other dog whistles. It's not like if you don't realize that it's a dog whistle, you have not acquired your language in a sense. They're more valuable in that sense. Maybe a good example. This was in recent political discourse in the UK, where Keir Starmer was using families, talking about families and people were saying, "Well, this is an anti-LGBT dog whistle." Partially because of what the claim of his aspect of the labor party believed a family should be. I think it would be wrong to say that family is a slur, right? But it can be used in certain contexts to dissent covert messages or overt messages in case maybe. 

So I think that's really the difference, that honorific slurs, epithets, have as part of their semantic meaning, this side content, this extra content where dog whistles don't. They really sort of emerge based on sort of statistical connections with rhetorics in a way that's not lexicalized. And that's the main difference. 

Megan: I wonder one more thing. I just keep thinking about critical race theory and how the left and the right use it differently. Is that also like when you have two groups that use... That's just like illegal. Illegals, I don't think many on the left are using it anymore. But this is different. Do you have any thoughts?

Dr. Robert: It's interesting. I think people groups can get polarized around a particular piece of language. And then how it's deployed can, of course, signal where you sit on that polarization. There's kind of like multiple strategies, right? You could back off a term if it becomes sort of too politicized. But I think if two groups are going to continue to use a term like let's say CRT or critical race theory, you could get probably other markers in utterance of when it is used. will tell you which side you're on. I think a dog whistle, as I mentioned before, family, out of context is not going to be a dog whistle, but maybe in particular utterances. It will flag a speaker is maybe holding a particular political point of view. So similarly with CRT, I think a term can exist as a dog whistle for multiple political subgroups, and will depend on what else is being said around that term. 

Carrie: It's not the only one, right? There's woke, there's DEI. Like those, they're actively trying to skunk all of these words, in my opinion. 

Dr. Robert: Yeah, absolutely. Some of these terms can be kind of complex because they also have a transparent compositional semantic meaning. Critical race theory means something like a theory, right? And so beyond its social linguistic connections, it also has some semantic meaning in addition, which sort of complicates the issue. 

Carrie: Anything else you want to leave our listeners with about your book or anything else? 

Dr. Robert: Yeah, I hope you read it. 

Megan: That's a good one. 

Dr. Robert: Yeah, I hope you read it. I hope people engage with it. I think that the book is definitely not the last word on the topic. I mentioned Jennifer Saul's work. I mentioned new work by Stanley and Beaver, 'Politics of Language.' And so that's not exhaustive. So there's a lot of work out there on dog whistles and political communication from a perspective of philosophy of language, formal semantics, pragmatics, and I think a lot of this work is very cool and of the moment. And so if you're interested, if you're a grad student or professor interested in a research area, it's very fertile ground to be looking at right now. So I think read our book and read other people's work and argue against us. 

Carrie: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on. And we obviously leave our listeners with one final message. 

Carrie & Megan: Don't be an asshole. 

Dr. Robert: Oh, really? That's what you say every time? Oh, great. 

Carrie: Every time.

Dr. Robert: It's not just about the dog whistles. Okay. Great. 

Megan: Nope. Always. 

Dr. Robert: Cool. 

Megan: Never be an asshole. 

Carrie: The Vocal Fry's podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon. The music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Vocal Fries pod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

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