Coming up on Word Matters, Dog Whistles and Red Meat,
and then we'll deal you in on some phrases from card games.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Neil Servin, Amin Shea,
Peter Sakalowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
The parlance of political commentary moves fast and often paints a vivid picture as it goes.
That's where we're starting today with Amenshe diving into two fairly new and very evocative terms,
dog whistle and red meat.
Listen carefully.
If you spend any time following politics or following somebody who follows politics,
you probably in the last few years have come across the expression dog whistle.
referring to something other than an auditory signal given to a dog.
It is something that we define within the context of politics as an expression or statement that has a secondary meaning intended to be understood only by a particular group of people.
This is often used before another noun.
This is an interesting shift in the meaning of dog whistle.
And dog whistle, of course, has a fairly obvious thing,
which is that it's a whistle to call a directed dog,
but especially it's one that sounds at a frequency that is inaudible to the human ear.
And so dog whistle say politics, dog whistle legislation,
dog whistle speech is very, very similar in a way.