“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…