"dog whistles"

[Geoffrey Nunberg]

I make it with vodka and Cointreau, but hold the cranberry and lime… a fruitless cosmopolitan.

Geoff

> > If you were going to botanize this device according to traditional rhetorical categories, metonymy seems to me less apt than synecdoche, in its less common meaning of "whole for part.” To qualify as a dog-whistle, a statement has to be ambiguous between a literal meaning and a potential conveyed meaning that the speaker can plausibly deny. That means that both meanings have to be of the same type-- e,g. "hoodie wearers," "food stamp recipients" or "the bling crowd" (once used by National Review) for blacks; "city boy” for Jews, etc.
>
> cf. "cosmopolitan" (or, if more specificity was needed, "rootless cosmopolitan") for 'Jew'.   Wonder if anyone has tried marketing "Rootless Cosmopolitan" as a drink, as an act of reclamation.  (Maybe with a dill pickle wedge in place of the usual lime.)
>
> LH
>

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