STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We have analysis of a single word - they. In political speech, that little word can do a lot of work. Think of the following sentence - police arrested a man who was accused of pointing a gun at the golf course where Donald Trump was playing. Now think of that sentence as some political actors have expressed it - they're trying to kill him. That one little word - they - makes an individual's crime sound like a conspiracy. The former president himself used the word they in a much-noticed passage of this month's presidential debate.
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DONALD TRUMP: What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country - and look at what's happened...
INSKEEP: Trump was in the middle of a riff. He was talking about the crowd sizes at his rallies, then referred to World War III, and then said they were letting in immigrants and added falsely that they were doing something terrible.
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TRUMP: They're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets.
INSKEEP: For the record, nobody was eating pets. One person in Ohio who complained about this has since retracted her story with an apology, according to The Wall Street Journal. But the former president, by using they, suggested a whole group of immigrants, or people who came in, as he said, were doing this. This wording caught the attention of Marcia Pally from New York University, who has written about the way that some Americans see politics in terms of us versus them.
MARCIA PALLY: They generally means two things - one, the so-called corrupt regime, government in Washington, the deep state. That's one basket of they. And the other they is in the second part of the quote - they are eating the pets, the dogs, the cats - they being minorities and new immigrants. What's so interesting about the quote is that it captures the two uses of they that are deep-seated in American culture that go back to the 17th century.
INSKEEP: What did you mean when you said this usage goes all the way back to the early years of this country as a set of colonies before it was even a country?
PALLY: For centuries, the people who came here came to escape oppression by authorities and governments for their religion, economic status, ethnicity and so on. We are self-selected for a democratic and healthy suspicion of authorities. So we also have the possibility that under duress and threat our suspicion of tyrannical government becomes suspicion of all government - government per se. And this makes a country and a society very difficult to function.
INSKEEP: I wonder if part of the benefit of they is you can be vague. You don't really even have to figure out exactly who the enemy is.
PALLY: Yeah, us-them thinking relies on the culturally familiar, long-standing, comfortable. They, in its usefulness, allows people all over the country to imagine they as whoever their targeted group is, the people they fear or have - don't know or have anxieties about. Us-them thinking and they is a very flexible response to duress.
INSKEEP: Professor Marcia Pally of NYU, thanks so much.
PALLY: Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here.
(SOUNDBITE OF HERMANOS GUTIERREZ'S "LOW SUN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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