Stray Thoughts on Language, August 8,2017

1.  I find a certain linguistic oddity fascinating in the more colloquial online comments about nasty wimminz.  That oddity is common in the so-called manosphere, and it means creating sentences where the term "women and men" is replaced by "women and males" or "females and men" or the sentence otherwise calls one biological sex male/female and the other man/woman.

I don't know the reason for that, but it's extremely common.  So common that when I see that use of the terms I know that misogyny is coming.

2.  The conservatives use the term "elites" in an odd way*.  Whenever a conservative uses that term it will not include, say, the Koch brothers or the owners of Walmart or Donald J. Trump. 

Money has dropped out of that meaning (which is very helpful for the many wealthy conservatives who indeed belong to a moneyed elite), and education has taken its place.  Imagine someone who works a low-wage job, lives in a drafty attic furnished from Salvation Army stores and eats beans and rice every day.  That person is part of the elite, as conservatives define it, as long as she or he has a college degree and as long as that attic is in an urban population center. 

The clues are clear:  A member of the "elites" means "likely to vote for Democrats" and went to school.

3.  "He took me in his arms, and kissed me.  I drowned in his smoldering eyes."
Now take out the "s" in "smoldering".

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*  That's not the deepest way of analyzing the conservative uses of "elites."  Conservatives attempt to associate it with certain liberal or progressive values so that it becomes easier to argue that those values are forced upon an unwilling population who'd much rather have fascism or a feudal system with lots of fundamentalist religion.  Those systems leave the money to the actual wealthy elites, and that is the real base of the Republican Party.