Interesting.

[conuly]

Unlike many people, I was disappointed and horrified but not really shocked by the election... mostly, because - despite my frequent advice - I do "read the comments". (That's also why I think the ACA is a coin toss - even the most hardliner trolls are no longer spamming liberal blogs just to say that "nobody deserves health care". A lot of things about the next four years concern me, but that's not the top of the list.)

So I've been reading the comments, and two things jump out at me.

First, there's been a definite uptick, on both sides, in people who think a winning argument is to accuse the other party of being young. Which... well, I don't say so to them, but it's actually a really immature argument. I thought we all were supposed to outgrow calling things "babyish" sometime around middle school. (And I'm aware of the minor hypocrisy of this thought, but still, I think the fallback on "but really, you're only a kid, right?" is telling of ones mental state.)

Second - and this is coming straight from the Trump supporters - is the accusation that caring about a popular vote is "sour grapes". It's not the sentiment that surprises me, it's the wording. There must be several ways to express that idea, but they all do it using those two words. Up until this election, I think I could count on one hand the number of times I've heard/seen/used that phrase outside of specifically reading the related fable. Is it really more common than I've hithertofore assumed? (Is the word hithertofore really so unusual that spellcheck doesn't recognize it!?)

The first was just a personal observation. The second... well, I don't know. Some of these I know are real people, I've spoken to them before on a variety of subjects and I just don't think they sat down for three years pretending to be normal people before revealing themselves as Trumpbots. Still, that level of similarity in their comments is startling. I know I'm just cynical, but I wonder about the implications here.

Comments

[sathari]

...wait. Apparently the phrase "sour grapes" either doesn't mean what I think it means, or it doesn't mean what THEY think it means. (I always thought it was sort of like, "Oh, well, I didn't really want this anyway, it's not actually desirable." Not... whatever it is the Trump supporters seem to be using it to mean? Like, they think we actually didn't want Clinton to win? *blinkblink*) (Wow, this is such a minor quibble I can't even believe I'm writing about it. But.)

[conuly]

Well, it certainly isn't the usage I'd pick, but they seem to be referring to our attitudes towards the Electoral College as sour grapes - presumably meaning we're only complaining because it worked against us.

That might be true. Certainly Trump and Gingrich only complained when they thought it worked against them. However, that doesn't make the complaints ipso facto invalid.

[sathari]

Ah, that makes more sense. Though, again, given that Trump and Gingrich have ALSO objected in their turns, it just sounds like the damn thing needs to go regardless. But you and I are in agreement on that, lol.

[steorra]

I'm sure I've seen/heard the expression 'sour grapes' used on multiple occasions.

[zhelana]

I'm sure it just means that Limbaugh, or Hannity or someone used the term and they liked it...

[sathor.livejournal.com]

The figure of speech is probably a meme of some sort - this sort of thing seems to happen quite often (where an uncommon word or turn of phrase ends up in the public lexicon as a result of some role model or influence.) I've noticed it a number of different times, often starting with something like the State of the Union Address, or an equally important event. However, Reddit also starts similar memes often, and memes like this pop up in smaller, tighter knit communities (or even circles of friends) readily.

Maybe a conservative news outlet used it, for instance, and then everyone who read that used it when talking to their friends about the sore-loser liberals, and from there it just became the go-to description for an even larger number of people than the original reader-base.

By the way, just dropping in to have a look (hopefully you don't mind.) I guess we have a mutual friend in elenbarathi.

[conuly]

Any friend of elenbarathi's is a friend of mine :)