dog whistle politics
n.— «The Americans call this “dog-whistle politics.” Blow a dog whistle, and you won’t hear much to get excited about. But the target of the whistle…the dogs—will detect a sound beyond the audible range of the rest of us, and will react to it. Two quite different messages are contained within the one action of blowing the whistle: the one benign, the other designed to be heard and heeded only by the ears tuned to it.» —“The Dog Whistler” by Tony Wright The Age (Australia) Apr. 8, 2000. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Twice a day the River Thames recedes, revealing a muddy shoreline. Hobbyists known as mudlarks stroll the surface searching for objects that have found their way into the river over the centuries, everything from ancient Roman jewelry to modern...
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...