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Someone more dedicated than I can count the characters. I personally think this isn’t even worth the time I’m taking to write this comment.
Replacing "folks" with "students" makes it 80.
I'd wager the title was changed to ensure that people didn't imagine that the students were children.
“persons," Middle English, plural of folk (n.). Colloquial sense of "people of one's family" is from 1715. In Old English in plural use it meant only "peoples, nations."
Now not all speakers using it mean it that way, but it's a lazy word to use to group people, and the othering of people it implies seems to equally apply. The condescending tone really shines through.
If you intend on continuing to use this word to address people, know that at least some of us are making this conversion in our heads at all times.
If you are addressing others, use better words to describe them. Calling people "folks" all the time is lazy and insulting.
No it’s not. “Folks” means “people”, it has for more than a thousand years, and it’s used most often with the exact same intent. You’re making negative and incorrect assumptions.
"Folks" is meant to elicit closeness or empathy.
Both have their uses. Choice of usage predates Obama by a wide margin.
People while also all including tends to bring with it the identity war with it.
I use folks as a 1:1 to avoid the above.
It's a shibboleth that says to others that you've been told that "people" has negative connotations and you are willing to adjust your speech based on what you've been told, but said negative connotations are not actually present in any dialect of English I've ever heard spoken.
All the strange culture war accusations are made even stranger by weird assumptions like this -- I don't know a single human being who has a problem with the word "people". I'm sure someone out there does, but I would conjecture that the vast majority of people -- even the folks you think of when using the word "culture war" -- have no problem with it
> People while also all including tends to bring with it the identity war with it.
I agree with you that I don't know anyone who has a problem with the word "people", but I do know several people (now including OP) who believe that some people do and make an effort to use "folks" to appease those (as far as I can tell fictional) people.
Used that way it's a shibboleth. Used by DeSantis it's a part of Southern U.S. English.
I've even seen people spell it "folx" in writing to make it clear that they're using it as a shibboleth, since as you note it can be ambiguous in the absence of other dialectical markers.
Re: foreigners, this whole discussion is very US-centric, when I say "dialects" I'm talking about different varieties of US English, not anything outside the US.
If you naturally use it because you genuinely believe people is offensive, then he's absolutely telling you to modify your speech, but that is because he thinks you are wrong and you are the problem and he directly disagrees with you and he's not shy about it, which I think is fine. There's no pretence at neutrality there, and if you are neutral then he's not saying what you think.
Meh, whatever. Different strokes for different folks.
That is, quite literally, one of its common definitions… as in most English dictionaries side against you here.
Also that “Obama-era” connotation preceded Obama by at least a full Obama.