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The online left seems incredibly frustrated right now. They are trying to link Paul Pelosi and those two MN “lawmakers” deaths to the right. I don’t think it’s working at all. Normies are not buying it. They’ve got very weak arguments and you can tell they’re losing the messaging fight and trying to throw whatever they can at the wall. Nothing is sticking.
P.S. has anyone else noticed this new “lawmaker” noun? I just picked up on it in the last few weeks but it’s absolutely everywhere. Has this been the case for a while? This is such a strange euphemism. Google says it’s because it’s gender neutral, but I don’t recall this from the time when we were changing all the other gendered words. It seems like there’s some other objective here with this change than gender.
It’s been a stock journalistic phrase for as long as I can remember and doesn’t seem strange or euphemistic to me at all. You never heard on the nightly news in the 2000s, “Lawmakers on capital hill are proposing a new bill to…”?
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Democrats would like to distance themselves from this lunatic. Republicans successfully distanced themselves from those lunatics. Is it any more complicated than that?
And now you’ve got me confused about the “lawmaker” thing. I’m normally pretty darn skeptical of Google trends, but it’s not subtle. Wikipedia starts with legislators, though the Responses section prefers lawmakers. CBS, CNN and NPR appear to favor lawmakers, as does Fox. The Guardian was the only one I found that uses both terms, and I suspect they wouldn’t have bothered if there weren’t two uses in one sentence. Even OANN gets in on it!
This is definitely some sort of fad, and I have no idea why.
I mean zoom out the graph and the baseline rate sees a very small gradual rise. Part of the issue is that the AP News wording is more viral than you’d think and more news outlets than you’d expect outright copy headlines in some form. (Or plagiarize)
It’s definitely Jan 6, 2021 that is when it starts going. Again, copy and paste I strongly suggest is the issue! This is non representative but contains some front pages on Jan 7: I stopped counting at 30 front pages, but exactly 20 of them mention “lawmakers” in bold headings. Phrases repeat suspiciously: “lawmakers duck for cover” dominates, and variants like “lawmakers hunker down” and even “lawmakers duck to find cover”, “lawmakers are forced into hiding”, etc. and sure enough, AP News article from the evening of J6 (I assume the date is wrong, shows J5 on the website which is clearly impossible) has “forced lawmakers into hiding” in the first paragraph. AP is a news wire service, by the way, deliberately designed for this purpose; and yes, I think it’s harmful to press freedom and true expression because the coordination effect is too large (popular however because it saves $$ since local papers are encouraged to basically paraphrase rather than write fresh copy, meaning fewer man hours and even more so the case when on a time crunch).
To me it’s a somewhat memetic natural process from there among the smallish club of news headline writers, with spikes on particular popular topics or articles. That’s why you see weird patterns, I actually expect such, precisely because of the AP (Reuters also has a similar effect but smaller).
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Our unmight has beteemed Norman sway over the English tongue for scores of years, but this is forestalled at last! Do not let "lawmaker" afear you! It betokens our folkright eft wending to the better, and the begetting of the Anglish uprising!
(yeah, I've got no
ideaken either; I just find itamusingmirthful that "lawmaker" is the word for "legislator" in the Anglishdictionarywordbook)Have you read uncleftish beholding?
Long ago; I loved it! It really was the epitome of "Modern" Anglish, where words with no non-Romance-descended English equivalents get rederived from old Germanic-English roots, as opposed to texts which merely use existing but antiquated non-Romance English words.
To be clear, though, I love this stuff in a for-entertainment-purposes-only way; one of the best things about English is how, after it "has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary", we've ended up in a state where every concept has three times as many ways to express it, each subtly different in meanings, connotations, formality, rhythm and rhyme, etc. Adding new Anglish formations to English would be fun (though if I was the Emperor of English I'd prioritize it way below things like universally-phonetic spelling), but actually replacing and removing non-Anglish words would be silly.
For that matter, I'm happy to have new Anglish formations remain reminiscent of but not actually part of English. I bookmarked that Anglish dictionary for use as an RPG game master, to draw words from when players roll a Linguistics check that's almost but not quite successful at translating a dead language their characters only partially understand.
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Maybe they decided most people were too stupid to know what a legislator was. Probably not wrong.
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It is really interesting to see different Political Weirdo Forums' assessment of public mood re: the Current Moment. Because they're... all over the place.
It picked up like a while ago as a catchall for elected officials (especially sub-Federal). It's suitably generic so you don't embarrass yourself by accidentally calling a county councilor a county boardmember, plus it sounds more impressive to quote a "lawmaker" instead of county board member from Tumbleweed County.
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See Google Trends. I hadn't noticed this month's spike, so I'll say no.
I've seen it used as a generic term for Senator, Member of Parliament, Member of the Legislative Assembly, City Councillor, and various foreign equivalents for at least a few years now, and didn't notice anything odd about it.
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Isn't "legislator" already gender neutral?
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https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&geo=US&q=lawmaker&hl=en
It really does seem abrupt. My personal assumption is somebody sent out talking points, though I couldn't predict who.
I commented above, but it’s nothing so nefarious (probably) - the AP’s influence on news headlines does a lot of heavy lifting. Idiosyncratic phrases and rare synonyms can easily become popular in bursts.
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Not long ago there was a document put out by some dem affiliated think tank that discouraged the use of offputting (pregnant person) or technical/academic language (overton window) so i'm guessing using lawmaker over legislator is an part of a broader attempt to avoid appearing out of touch/highfalutin.
What's wrong with "overton window"? Someone saying they want to shift the overton window is a very strong signal of their goals, and if they're using the term it's because they want other people to know what their goals are and how they intend to achieve them.
They considered it to be too obscure for the average voter I believe.
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Good ole Anglo-Saxon words over Latinisms.
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I actually like it. All 50 states have different legislative structures. Most use the typical terms "senator" and "representative" for members, but some don't. It's a lot easier to just use the generic term "lawmaker" for every state legislative body member. They could use the fancy term "legislator", but that means the same thing while being less understandable for those citizens who couldn't pass government class.
This hits on both things I dislike. The academic/liberal/PMC power move to suddenly change words and pronunciation to signal in group status. And dumbing down language even further. Really, legislator is too fancy? Though again it’s also some sort of radical egalitarianism that where people can virtue signal that they’re considering the uneducated in the country.
I feel like you may be projecting a lot of meaning into it. To some extent all groups do this. I work in data science and boy let me tell you, buzzwords come into vogue so fast it makes your head spin. Famously kids often invent new vocab or participate in language trends on purpose to signal ingroup status and awareness, but adults do it too, and not exclusively politically. It’s not usually deliberate, it’s life.
It’s also inconsistent that you think that re-introducing a previously more rare word dumbs down language. Isn’t an expanded vocabulary usually a sign of higher level language, not lower? It’s not as if “legislator” or “senator” or what have you are less popular or obsolete, much less low status to say.
Don’t get me wrong: focus group messaging firms do impact political word choice. I can even name drop one (though a Republican): Frank Luntz. But they don’t always work, and don’t always show up. He pushed for energy exploration instead of oil drilling in a 2003 memo, and climate change instead of global warming in a 2002 memo, but as far as I can see, neither actually wholly replaced the other and although the choice might signal something, it’s not so obvious. In fact climate change actually got adopted by the left!
A sort-of peer of his on the left, the don’t think about an elephant guy George Lakoff, pushed stuff like climate crisis/emergency instead, and public option vs government healthcare, and stuff like that. Not all were so enduring. Yes, the 2016-2023 era had a decent amount of leftist word policing of “bad” words, but that’s not related or analogous to this objection at all. Your radar is misfiring.
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