Deplorable is a weird word and not just because it’s a big word

How many of you honestly think to yourselves “that’s deplorable” when you hear about something terrible? I don’t know about the rest of you but when I find out a cop murdered another person or about some nazi shit or about some nonce shit or something like that, my first thoughts are “that’s disgusting” not “that’s deplorable”

Deplorable is an attack yes but it’s a weak attack, it’s an old timey word that has been relegated to academia and devoid of any emotion behind it

Someone calling something or someone deplorable just has no bite to it because you can tell that the person using the word doesn’t actually care about the thing they’re talking about

If Hillary actually hated Trump supporters even half as much as I do she’d have called them disgusting hogs because that’s what they are

For me I think it’s because weird is far more harmful as it outgroups conservatives as not being part of the accepted majority thought and so are instead being “weird” or “cringe” by talking about stupid shit. Also ngl looking at someone and simply saying “my God you are weird and fucking stupid” is a shutdown that conservatives understand as they use it on others.

tldr: fash don’t like being attacked with the stuff they use to attack marginalized peeps

Chuds revel in being evil. Calling them villains or bad guys or saying they’re a disgrace will have no effect. “Clever” whedonesque comebacks never work because they’re dork shit. You just sound like an elementary school nerd in a crappy TV show trying to outsmart a bully. It never works, even in media.

Calling them creepy freaks works for the same reason it worked in elementary school. It others them and identifies their views as abnormal and fringe. A huge aspect of their ideology is the false belief that they and their beliefs are normal, that they are the bulwark of normalcy fighting against people who want to do strange and unnatural things. Slapping them with a straight-up dismissal of them and their views with a refusal to engage shuts them down entirely.

Deplorable is too mamy syllable for american to say. Also hillary clinton lol

2, 4, 9

“deplorable” is a norman word, “weird” is an anglo-saxon word

germanic root words hit the anglosphere brainstem

simple as

I think perhaps grifters just gave it more ‘power’; kind of like boomer. A whole bunch of people who make their money complaining about everything under the sun decided to hyperfocus on this and cry about it and gave it a more potent effect.

Also the term deplorable is akin to calling different minority groups criminals; it ascribes crimes to a wide swathe of people and creates a sense of victimization; it’s sort of like how today if you criticize Nazis, Republicans will immediately perk up and say ‘we’re not Nazis!’ (an interesting point Vaush once made was that in the past, if you said you hated Nazis, conservatives would’ve said ‘yeah, we hate them too’; but today associate the term Nazis with themselves). Weird on the other hand is to say that they’re acting out of the norm, and no one wants to be different; Also incels and many other weird right wing groups aren’t completely accepted within conservative circles and no one wants to be associated with them.

“Basket of Deplorables” came out of Hillary’s mouth. Hillary’s, eh, Hillary. If you don’t like her for the destabilization of Libya, you probably don’t like her for just being kind of uptight and ostentatious in general.

I also think the situation with the right has degraded considerably since then, too.

Clinton was speaking about the supporters and not the leaders. So I’d agree with you that she came off as a snobby out of touch elite who didn’t like the unwashed masses.

There’s also the thing about the conservatives trying to wear the mantle of “silent majority” that calling conservative leadership and talking heads weird seems to be sticking.

It might also be a good way to sidestep getting sucked into a debate bro situation. It’s up to the other person to not be weird, you don’t have to supply a logical argument why somebody else is weird.

Let’s put it this way: I’m a very smart person, and I can’t give a specific definition for Deplorable. I can’t even think of easy examples. The first thing that comes to mind is Jews in the Holocaust. It’s so complex that to most people it really just means bad. It failed because nobody fucking knows what it means.

There’s a thread in the 1992 film ‘The Babe’ about Babe Ruth around the word “incorrigible”. As a young boy, he is labelled with this term ending him up in the ‘special class’ for bad kids, etc. It comes back around when he assaults other characters in his adult life after that word is used against him. I think this is probably a bit of the boomer brain recognition of ‘deplorables’ in related to this language.

The words sound similarly judgemental, while weird is taken as a more ‘in the moment’ behavioral meaning. “Incorrigible” and “deplorables” are similarly permanent seeming, like an attack on someones core being, not just related to current behaviors. There’s also the vibe of ‘reclaiming’ deplorables. “The Expendables” was released in 2010, so maybe that’s a bit of a response in some ways.

Weird is just not as broadly judgemental. Many things can be weird and also be cool or good. Weird things can become familiar and less weird over time, etc.

deplorables has too many syllables

People who are tired of Democrats being respectful like weird a lot

Big heaping helping of number ten for me. It feels like the Dems have finally caught up to 2012 in terms of political rhetoric - maybe enough of the Obama people have eaten shit over the past decade that the party’s functionaries have finally stopped thinking that they’re in an episode of The West Wing.

I’m not a Dem but I would really like it if they went all in on just constantly calling the Republicans exactly the unlikable fascists that they are. One of my biggest disappointments with Kamala is that she is still rolling with Republican rhetoric on the border - fukken drop that shit and tell voters that the Republicans are trying to deport every single person working on every single farm and that that would be bad (see also: Israel’s ongoing genocide is not self defense).

I figure whats gonna happen is Dems’ll never get what made “weird” work. It’s not the word itself it’s the dismissal without disdain. “Weird” is different than normal. “Normal” is what fascists claim to be. Is you call them weirdos it ruins their argument, since part of the whole populism thing means they have be seen as normal before they can denounce “the other”

“Deplorable” is as OP says, elitist. Anyone with chops can discount “deplorable” by singin’ “friends in low places” and get right back to vilifying “the other”.

But i don’t think they’ll ever get that. I think they’ll lean on “weird” until it’s lost it’s meaning. My personal guess as to why? They actually are elitist so they don’t get the difference.

those are all good points, i’d add that deplorable also has a level of moral judgment to it that weird doesn’t and the media balked at hillary saying that trump supporters were bad people. also “weird” is targeting vance and trump specifically instead of just their supporters. i also think that “deplorable” was easy to reclaim for trump supporters in a way that “weird” can’t be. 8+ years of terrible thanksgivings and annoying coworkers/customers/strangers etc also primed non-trump supporters to view them as “weird”, you can only hear about litter boxes in schools and tom hanks being executed in gitmo so many times before you are willing to just brush off anything they say as deranged and, well, weird