Folks versus People
Recently I was amused to hear Jon Stewart express bewilderment at George Bush’s continued use of the word folks in inappropriate contexts. This is one of many of the President’s peculiarities of speech that has bothered me for some time. Stewart was referring to this remark in the President’s July 4 speech:
Many of the spectacular car bombings and killings you see are as a result of al Qaeda — the very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th.”
Folks is not–at least it hasn’t been since Chaucer’s time–an exact synonym for people. Whereas people is a standard word that may be used in any context, folks is a colloquialism with definite connotations.
Folks generally suggests a certain warmth and “down home” flavor. Just as kids is not the most appropriate word to use when talking about young people who have robbed a store and beaten its owner, folks is probably not the best word to use when referring to people who go around blowing up shoppers at the local market or mourners at a funeral.
The word folk can refer to a group of people related in some way, either by blood or by occupation. For example, one can speak of “farmer folk” as well as “the German folk.” When used to refer to members of a nation, folk usually carries the connotation of “the common people.” Folklore is the study or body of stories and beliefs of the “common” people. Likewise folk music is less sophisticated than classical or pop.
The adjective folksy implies the relaxed, informal behavior and speech associated with rural people. President Bush, for example, wins many of his supporters by projecting a folksy Texas image that belies his expensive education at an Andover prep school and at Yale and Harvard universities.
The word people can mean something other than “human beings in general.” In expressions like the motto “the People rule,” people has the sense of the public, all of the people as a political entity. The phrase “you people” is sometimes used to lump people for criticism, as in “You people don’t know what you’re talking about!” or even simply “You people!”
Small mythical humanoid creatures, like leprechauns, may be called either “the Little People” or “the Little Folk.”
In addition to being the most usual noun for human beings considered collectively, people can also be used as a verb meaning “to populate” or “give birth to more human beings”: According to the Hebrew Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve peopled the earth with their descendants.
Unlike “my folks” which means “my family members,” the expression “my people” seems to mean “people who work for me” or “people who look out for my interests.”
Only time will tell what finally happens with folks. Heard frequently enough, nonstandard usage comes to sound “right.”
Maeve on July 24, 2007 
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“The word folk can refer to a group of people related in some way, either by blood or by occupation.”
Then, I would say that Bush used it correctly. ;-).
Jay,
Bush called them “folks,” not “folk.”
I suppose he could say “killer folk” as one might say “farmer folk” or “fisher folk,” but the idiom would still be off since “folk” is by established usage a “friendly” word. Such a phrase as “killer folk: could be used ironically, I guess.
Thanks for the Daily Writing Tips - I recommend them to all those who will listen.
On my people’: ‘the expression “my people” seems to mean “people who work for me” or “people who look out for my interests.” ‘ I think it also refers to one’s own racial or ethnic group as in ‘my people have lived here for 10 000 years’.
Nice to know the difference as I’ve used the word “folk” or “folks” a number of times in the novel I’m writing. Sad to say that in either case I used it incorrectly.
People it is then.
Thanks for the tip.
Interesting info, but some bloggers like to write in a certain style to make them seem more unique, you could call it ’silly’ or ‘wrong’ but hey.
Matt, I think English has a very large vocabulary so that one could be unique without being unidiomatic :).
folk: people in general (often used in the plural); “they’re just country folk”; “folks around here drink moonshine”; “the common people determine the group character and preserve its customs from one generation to the next”
Source: http://www.google.com/search?h.....tnG=Search
People: In general, the English word people refers to a specific group of humans, or to persons in a general sense.
Source:
http://www.google.com/search?h.....tnG=Search
I don’t used the word “folks” very often but growing up in the South (Louisiana—I am not Cajun.) I have heard “folks” used exactly the way that President Bush using it. I never thought about it being different than people. President Bush, growing up in Texas, probably heard it used that way all of his life, just as I have. Thanks for correcting my English. It is a Southern thing.
I find Bush’s use not only acceptable, but better than using “people.”
Politically, it’s just the right expression. Our society is becoming split between two groups.
1. Those who’re so afraid of terrorism they pander to it. This would include most of the news media, which typically calls them ‘militants,’ as if they simply had a fascination with carrying weapons.
2. Those who’re devoting too much attention to defeating what is more a nuisance than the sort of life-as-we-know it threat the old USSR offered with its thousand of nuclear weapons.
“Folks” cuts terrorists down to size, splitting the difference between “people” and demonization. It puts them on the same level with the old racists who tossed rocks through black church windows or drove through black neighborhoods blowing their horns. Terrorism, whether by the Klan or Islamists, is the ideology of losers.
And indeed, it became obvious that segregation was ending in the late 1950s when black neighborhoods quit hiding in their homes when the Klan rode through and stood in their yards laughing at the spectacle.
–Mike Perry
Editor of Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton
Mike-
I wish you would offer a bit more analysis of exactly how using “folks” “cuts terrorists down to size.” I can see how one might use it ironically, drawing on the connotation of “folks” as a group of people with whom one has some kind of kinship, or at least commonality, to suggest that terrorists are violating the rules of decency that connect “folks” in kinship or commonality. In other words, one might call them “folks” to remind the listener that they don’t behave at all like “folks” should. I wouldn’t call that “cutting terrorists down to size,” so much as using irony to deliver a subtle moral rebuke. That doesn’t get me to your analogy with laughing at Klansmen, though.
Also, notice that I use “one” instead of Bush. This is because I’m skeptical that someone of Bush’s linguistic ineptitude would deploy such subtleties, especially given his history of demonizing terrorists, and his distaste for “splitting the difference” with anything, including niceties of word choice.
If you want to be folksy, the plural of person used to be persons.