folk devil
Appearance
English
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Audio (General Australian): (file)
Noun
[edit]folk devil (plural folk devils)
- (idiomatic, sociology) A person or type of person blamed by the public for various ills, as during a moral panic.
- 1987 July 9, Steve Lohr, “Newcastle Journal: Half of England where jobs are as rare as Tories”, in New York Times[1], retrieved 27 February 2009:
- It may be true, as Fred Robinson, a senior researcher at Newcastle University said, "Many people view Mrs. Thatcher as a kind of folk devil.
- 1996 December 18, Robert Verkaik, “‘Crash’ tackling”, in The Independent (UK)[2], retrieved 8 June 2014:
- "Every time things become problematic we start careering towards social causes and pick on a folk devil to attribute all evil."
- 2013 October 20, Jesse Walker, “Conspiracies: Five things they don’t want you to know”, in Boston Globe[3], retrieved 8 June 2014:
- There is always a tendency, in the mainstream as much as the fringes, to blame real or imagined social problems on a folk devil.
Synonyms
[edit]- scapegoat; see also Thesaurus:scapegoat
Hypernyms
[edit]- pariah; see also Thesaurus:outcast