Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
if needed, we can use this 2008 blog post to help bridge the gap between 1995 and 2018 that we have now. That post was also written about (from a critical point of view) in this article from The Atlantic. I think this is a good example of what I consider to be the original narrow use of the term: something only a few people can hear.
There is also a sentence in a paper which I think gives a good definition:
Take, for example, Jennifer Saul’s discussion of George W. Bush using a dogwhistle in his 2003 State of the Union speech. In this speech, which was seemingly unrelated to religious issues, he invoked the idea of wonder-working power to signal to fundamentalist Christians that he spoke their language, that is, that he was one of them. For them, using “wonder-working power” in a speech means alluding to the power of Christ, for people who are not fundamentalist Christians, however, it is an empty phrase, or as Saul notes, ‘an ordinary piece of fluffy political boilerplate, which passes without notice’ (Saul 2018, p. 362).
This paper is a bit long to support one single usage example, but presumably the word appeared in the 2018 paper, which may have been more concise.
I may be able to turn up another use-example from Feb 2000 during Bush's first campaign for president when he appeared at a university in S Carolina, but so far Im finding lots of writeups but not the word dogwhistle that I was looking for.
If these are at all helpful I can add them to either the main page or the citations page, but i have trouble with reading and using templates so i want to wait to see if these are needed. thanks, —Soap—23:01, 31 December 2022 (UTC)Reply
