The Zim trial is sure bringing out...

[SHRED]

...the racism in the Repug/RW.

I frequent a few mixed forums and the word "thug" and "animal" and worse are used to describe Trayvon.
Or they claim Trayvon would have become a gang member anyway.
This is really nauseating but not surprising.

[Hoyt]

1. Sadly, "Thug" has been used here. Bigots and guns don't mix well.

[bigdarryl]

2. YEP!!! coming from the pro-life crowd

Randi Rhodes is on point when she says they love the fetus but hate the babies

[RandiFan1290]

4. Are you familiar with Neil Rogers?

If you want see one of her major influences and the main reason she is who she is today you have to hear some Neil. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_rogers

Here she is in 93 doing an intro video for Neil. It was filmed by her ex husband Jim.

[Scootaloo]

3. It's not looking so hot here on DU, either.

Thankfully nothing quite so blatant (Well, "thug"...) but, y'know... once you learn how to hear the dog whistles, they become extremely fucking obvious, and it's not just the right wing packed to the gills with sanctimonious Turner Diaries-readers.

[Igel]

5. Ah. "Dog whistles."

I was trained as a linguist. One thing we do is called "morphemic analysis." Take words and break them up into their bits, link meanings to those bits, and figure out how people form words and how people understand words.

So "thankfully" would be "thank" (noun), "ful" (a nifty way of making a specific kind of adjective out of a noun), and "ly" (making the adjective into an adverb).

One old-fashioned way of doing this--we're talking 1960s or before--had a kind of template or pattern set up, with all the little bits fitting into slots. The problem was a lot of words don't have things in those "slots" where they should have them. It was really, really obvious that they needed to be there.

Take "dog" as an adjective: "dog whistle". It has nothing where it should have a bit of word that says, "Hey, this is an adjective." Since that slot had to be filled, with a perfectly straight face it was proposed that there were "zero morphemes." Little bits of words that had meaning but were perfectly silent and completey ignored. There were lots of them. Everywhere you looked you found them. It was really obvious--they were exactly where you expected them. This bothered people.

Of course, the problem with zero morphemes is figuring out where this completely ignored silent "bit". If there's no trace that they're there apart from your linguistic theory, are they really there or is it your theory that's a bit off? What's the evidence that there's not a zero morpheme in the word "is"? How do you not only show where they are--theory does that--but also where they aren't? How do you falsify the theory? Or is it a matter of faith?

It didn't take long for a better theory to come along, one that removed zero morphemes from linguistics. Yet in the 1990s I was still taught this theory, and I had one professor who still used "zero morphemes," at least for some things. A lot of other things like zero morphemes have come along. Noun-verb incorporation. Trace theory. Residue theory. But they all have the same problem--showing that the silent bit that has to be there really is there and isn't "silent." And if it's not really silent, then you don't need "zero morphemes" or "silent elements."

The thing about dog whistles is that unless you're actually a dog, with canine teeth, a tail, and a baculum (if male, at least), you can't hear them. They're silent. And if they're not silent, then they're not dog whistles, at least not in the sense you used the term.