“Hi, Folks.”

How a once-friendly, neighborly word—”folks”—became a quiet sort of insult.

By Liesl Schillinger
Illustration by Keetra Dean Dixon

Thirty-five years ago, when the late wordsmith William Safire — a former Nixon speechwriter, and the coiner of the phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism” — began writing “On Language,” a New York Times Magazine column about the changing currents of American speech, he opened with the simple salutation “How do you do.” (Note the lack of question mark, which was his initial, throat-clearing point.) In homage I had wanted to begin this column, “News of the Word,” with the phrase; but in intervening decades, the expression “How do you do” has fallen out of favor, replaced by the more perfunctory “Nice to meet you,” or the slangy “How ya doin’?” or “How’s it goin’?” If you are determined to hear someone say “How do you do,” your best bet is to watch the film My Fair Lady — in which Audrey Hepburn (as Eliza Doolittle) says it repeatedly, with a mannered flourish. These days, though, there is no longer one de rigueur stock phrase of introduction. And so, I’ll just begin, “Hi, folks.”

Question: What do I mean by “folks”?

The word “folks” used to have a bonhomous, backslapping, affectionate quality in this country; “folks” were ordinary people like…