Are silent dog whistles really silent?
Of course, no whistle is truly silent; they simply operate at such a high frequency that human ears cannot detect it. … Dogs have much more sensitive hearing than our own; they can hear sounds up to an impressive 45 000 Hz, so the whistle sound is easily within their range of hearing.
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In her final pitches to voters, Hillary Clinton has been arguing that much of what Donald Trump’s says amounts to “a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters” — as she put it in North Carolina last week.
Meanwhile, reacting to one of Trump’s final ads, which suggests Clinton is a tool of “the global special interest,” Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo, finds it “packed full of anti-Semitic dog whistles.”
The phrase “dog whistle” has been around for years. Its political shorthand for a phrase that may sound innocuous to some people, but which also communicates something more insidious either to a subset of the audience or outside of the audience’s conscious awareness — a covert appeal to some noxious set of views. Given Trump’s racially charged campaign, and the support he has attracted from fringe groups, including the KKK, it’s not surprising that the phrase has featured so prominently in the 2016 political lexicon.
To be sure, many people believe there is no shortage of overtly offensive content in Trump’s crystal-clear statements — whether he’s suggesting that the typical illegal immigrant is a rapist or stating outright that American Muslims know about terror attacks in advance. Additionally, the philosopher Jennifer Saul has argued that Trump has moved beyond the dog whistle into other forms of barely disguised bigotry.
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Figuratively, a dog whistle is a coded message communicated through words or phrases commonly understood by a particular group of people, but not by others.
Dog whistle appears to have taken on this political sense in the mid-1990s; the Oxford English Dictionary currently has a citation from a Canadian newspaper, The Ottawa Citizen, in October of 1995, as their earliest recorded figurative use: “Its an all-purpose dog-whistle that those fed up with feminists, minorities, the undeserving poor hear loud and clear.”
The earliest, and still most common, meaning of dog whistle is the obvious one: it is a whistle for dogs. Dog ears can detect much higher frequencies than our puny human ears can, so a dog whistle is nothing more than an exceedingly high-pitched whistle that canines can hear, but that we cannot.
The recent appearance of the figurative use does not mean that dog whistle has not been used previously to describe the habit that politicians occasionally have of sending coded messages to a certain group of constituents. In 1947, a book titled American Economic History referred to a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as being “designed to be like a modern dog-whistle, with a note so high that the sensitive farm ear would catch it perfectly while the unsympathetic East would hear nothing.” However, saying that speech is like a dog-whistle (which is a simile) is not quite the same as saying that it is a dog whistle (which is a metaphor), and this subtle distinction is what causes us to judge the phrase as having originated in the 1990s, rather than the 1940s.