This is Mike Ballo of Lexicon Valley.
And I'm Bob Garfield.
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Do you communicate or acquire information with, you know, language?
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From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I'm Mike Volo.
Join this week by John McWhorter.
If you plug the word racist into Google search trends,
that's an online tool that tracks search data going back to 2004.
If you plug in racist, you see spikes all throughout the past 20 plus years.
But if you plug in the phrase openly racist, you see almost nothing.
prior to early 2016 when it really starts to take off.
That coincides precisely with the beginning of the Trump era,
when people who either define themselves or are defined by others as openly racist were suddenly empowered in a way that they arguably had not been for decades.
And all of a sudden, the phrase was appearing in songs.
You could hear it in television shows.