Coded Language Quotes

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.

There's even a feature on my website where you can translate messages into codes, so whenever I have any big news it goes out in code first so the diehard fans are the first to know.

"Family" this and "family" that. If I had a family I'd be furious that moral busybodies are taking the perfectly good word family and using it as a code for censorship the same way "states' rights" was used to disguise racism in the mid-sixties.

For decades, or at least for years, Republican politicians have been dog whistling about race. And then, when - they're shocked when Donald Trump starts barking.

My Grandmother wouldn't even speak the word Democrat if there were children in the room, she'd say Bastards instead.

Slang has always moved this way. From Cockney rhyming slang to codes swapped among highwaymen, they're tribal badges of identity, bonding mechanisms designed to distinguish the initiated, and to keep strangers out.

Competition is the new code word, and Washington needs code words. It doesn't think in sentences often.

We encrypt 'Drag Race' with the secret language that kept gay people linked for many years before the '80s.

In mixed company women practise a kind of visual shorthand that they later decode in detail in other women's company.

My first album was mainly dealing with street issues, and it was 'coded': it was called 'Reasonable Doubt.' So the things I was talking about... I was talking about in slang, and it was something that people in the music business was not really privy to. They didn't understand totally what I was saying or what I was talking about.

I would imagine that if you could understand Morse code, a tap dancer would drive you crazy.

But for me, it was a code I myself had invented! Yet I could not read it.

Look at the coded language the Right is using against President Barack Obama. Openly calling him a liar in Congress, saying he is 'not a Christian, he was not born here, he is not one of us.' That makes addressing such issues trickier for the first African-American in the White House.

Those in blue suits who use thinly veiled race symbols -- when they say welfare and crime and three strikes and anti- affirmative action -- they are sending messages more profound their language.

I'm beginning to think cookies is a code word for something else." "Maybe it is." He tugged on my bag again as he took a confident step back, forcing me down another step. "And just think about it. If cookie was a code word, whatever it symbolizes, it's been in your mouth, sweetheart.

Slang is really coded talk. I can say a few things, in front of somebody, that only people who know what I'm saying are going to pick up on.

I think our everyday coded language around 'good neighborhoods' and 'bad neighborhoods' is what allows for tremendous violence to happen... When you label a neighborhood 'bad' and avoid it, then you don't know and don't see what goes on there. And there's no human face to interrupt that narrative.

The Republican Party is saying that the president of the United States has bosses, that the union bosses this president around - the unions boss him around. Does that sound to you like they are consciously or subconsciously deliver the racist message that, of course - of course, a black man can't be the real boss?

Republicans are no longer allowed to say that people are rich. You have to refer to them as "job creator." You can't even use the word rich. You have to say, "This chocolate cake is so moist and job creator."