"Democrat Party/Platform" (conservative epithet) vs. "Democratic Party/Platform" (Party Usage)

Can I be pedantic for a moment, and call for an end to referring to Democratic positions (or anything else) as Democrat? The right wing stated doing that as a part of their disinformation campaign, we need to gut it entirely. It’s the noun/adjective thing, they are different.

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The Democrat party has a platform, and that platform would be accurately referred to as the “Democrat Platform”. Just like there is a “Republican Platform”.

Looking up the words, you’re right, Democrat technically is a noun - but in common usage it used as an adjective as well. To make matters confusing, republican can be both a noun and an adjective. One would naturally assume the same for the other side.

I guess technically “Democratic” is more correct. But I have heard self proclaimed Democrats use the same nomenclature. And even if all of the right wing attacks suddenly were grammatically correct, it would change nothing. Fixing this would do literally nothing to change the “disinformation”.

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Who are the Democrat Party?

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That was a lot of words just to express the sentiment; “I was incorrect.”

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It’s the DEMOCRATIC Party. NOT the DEMOCRAT party. It is the actual name.

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There isn’t any reason for avoiding a compound noun here though. You would be perfectly comfortable with saying “The Microsoft position is that robotics will dominate technological innovation in the 21st century.” or “The Seahawk strategy is to focus on defense.” In the case of “Seahawk strategy”, we have a noun-noun compound for a team that is called “The Seattle Seahawks” - plural - and the yet the compound is with a singular “Seahawk”. This seems to me perfectly analogous to the “Democrat position”.

Excellent recent paper on the semantics of compounds: Systematicity in the semantics of noun compounds: The role of artifacts vs. natural kinds

ETA: Since it wasn’t clear above “There isn’t any reason” should be read as “There isn’t any grammatical reason.” I had misread @docosc 's reference to pedantry to be saying that “Democrat position” is bad grammatically, when in fact he meant that it is bad politically.

My objection lies in the fact that this particular alteration of the commonly used term was invented by right wing asshats to devalue the positions held by Democratic politicians. IMHO, it needs to die.

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It does give the impression that media conservatives are exploiting the fact that the nominal form of “Republican” is “Republican” whereas the nominal form of “Democratic” is “Democrat”.

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It’s only common usage among Faux News users.

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The preferred term used by the Democratic Party is Democratic. Why is it so hard to respect that?

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The preferred term for a member of the Democratic Party is “Democratic”? Would that make me “a Democratic”?

Come on. Democratic / Democrat has been the accepted usage for 200 years, up until 4 years ago when conservative pundits decided that it would be insulting to refuse to respect that usage and invent their own. That did not change the previous centuries usage, not the preferred usage of the persons in question, but it fell in line with the rightwing “you do not get to define yourself, only we can define you” kind of mindset.

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Democrat is a noun and democratic is an adjective, as you can find in any English dictionary. As has been said, it’s only for the purpose of misleading that people recently started making up this one exception. So why exactly are you being so resistant to using them the regular way?

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Did you not see my post above about noun-noun compounds? It is a very regular part of the English language and not one exception. I am fully in agreement that “Democratic position” should be favored over “Democrat position” but this is not because there is anything in English grammar which favors one over the other.

It’s a regular part of English in some cases but as has been pointed out not this one, where it was a recent invention to skew dialog and is not what the party itself prefers. Did you not see everyone else’s posts above on that? :unamused:

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I did. Again, I don’t use “Democrat position”. What are you missing?

I am missing why you said there was “isn’t any reason for avoiding” the use of Democrat in such compounds, as you said in this post, and made fun of the idea that Democratic is the preferred term in this post, if you genuinely understand there is a reason to avoid Democrat and prefer Democratic in such uses as you imply in this post. Maybe you can forgive me for being a little confused what you are trying to say?

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Indeed. This isn’t that difficult:

vs.

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I had edited this into my post to explain my misunderstanding:

As @Melizmatic says, that was a lot of words just to express the sentiment “I was incorrect.”

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I had replied in the other thread, apparently just at the time this was being created, so I got caught hanging out there by myself.

This is like insisting on mispronouncing Kamala Harris’ first name.

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