Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A whistle used for training or commanding dogs, especially one that emits sound of a frequency too high for most humans to hear.
- noun The use of terms that seem innocuous but are intended to convey a hidden and potentially controversial message to a particular audience.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A high-pitched whistle,
inaudible tohumans , used totrain dogs. - noun That which is understood only by a narrow demographic.
- noun politics Especially, an allusion or comment made by a
politician with the intent that only a certaindemographic note it and recognize its significance.
Etymologies
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Examples
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john commented on the word dog whistle
“The potential double meaning rekindled speculation among Mr. Bush's critics that he communicates with his conservative Christian base with a dog-whistle of code words and symbols, deliberately incomprehensible to secular liberals.�?
The New York Times, Speaking in the Tongue of Evangelicals, by David D. Kirkpatrick, October 17, 2004
November 3, 2008
kewpid commented on the word dog whistle
see dog-whistle.
November 3, 2008
vendingmachine commented on the word dog whistle
"It's called a “dog whistle,” a word or phrase in a speech that is unobjectionable on the surface but conveys a coded message to partisans, by analogy to high-pitched sounds that are audible to dogs but not to people. Richard Nixon leaned on it heavily during his 1968 presidential campaign, referencing “law and order” and a “war on drugs,” further codifying racial appeals from Barry Goldwater for “states’ rights” and “freedom of association.” Ronald Reagan took it to another level in 1976, demonizing a “welfare queen” who fraudulently collected $150,000 in government benefits, a barely concealed appeal to the race and class resentments of white voters toward Blacks.
By that standard, President Trump’s riff about the “good genes” found among the people of Minnesota — an 80 percent white state — wasn’t a dog whistle. It was a train whistle, folding in Trump’s long-held belief that some people, himself especially, are simply born with superior traits to others."
--Trump to nearly all-white crowd: 'You have good genes', Yahoo! News, https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/09/21/trump-to-nearly-all-white-crowd-you-have-good-genes/24626071/
September 22, 2020