<p><a href="http://americasfuture.org/doublethink/2009/01/12/the-other-f-word/" target="_blank">Godspeed</a>:</p>
<p><span class="articles-body">
<p class="quote">My animus against <em>folks</em> is of
about a decade-and-a-half’s standing–roughly coinciding with the
present extent of my adult life. As a youngster, growing up in exurban
intramillennial central Florida, I associated <em>folks</em> with a
decidedly spotty melange of people and milieus: broad-as-birchwood
depictions of hillbilly life, whether of the televisual Beverlyian or
animatronic Disneyan rural ursine variety; certain second-tier
old-timey crooners such as Burl Ives; the <em>Po Folks</em> chain of
so-called family restaurants; and new-timey country singer Mel Tillis’s
commercials for the petroleum vendor FINA (”They’re my kind of
f-f-f-folks at FINA” was Mel’s stammering signature line). I cannot
recall a single occasion of my minority on which the f-word was used by
anyone actually in my presence–whether my parents, my grandparents, my
teachers, my principal, my schoolmates (on either side of any so-called
tracks), my bus drivers, the school janitor, or, indeed, the homeless
dude at the convenience store up the road. In other words, I regarded <em>folks</em> as part of the vernacular not of a particular <em>class</em> of people, but of a certain ontological category thereof; that category being something as pretty darn near close to <em>fictional</em> as one could get beyond spitting distance of a “Once upon a time…” clause.</p>
</span></p>
Douglas Robertson | Doublethink Online
etymology word folks dictionary, doublethink douglas robertson
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2009-01-14T10:27:15-05:00
<p>The author's (extremely long) quest to get to the bottom a certain reality: people actually use the word "folks" in conversation.</p>
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2009-01-14T10:27:21-05:00
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The F Bomb
2009-01-14T16:14:12-05:00
http://americasfuture.org/doublethink/2009/01/12/the-other-f-word/
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