Crickets after Trump s joke

“The other day, a senator I know got a text—a great guy—from his wife,” Trump said. “And she said, when you get home, I want to have you immediately come up the stairs and make love to me. And he said, I can’t do both.” Crickets.

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Why Do We Say “Crickets” When It’s Silent?
Cricket chirps can reach 100 decibels. So why do we use them as a byword for ‘silence’?
By
Mark Peters
|
Jul 15, 2024

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Even this cricket wants to know the answer.
Even this cricket wants to know the answer. | ilbusca/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images (cricket), Gokcemim/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images (background)
What are the sounds of silence? With all due respect to Simon and Garfunkel, the most common answer is “crickets.” This noisy insect has somehow become synonymous with no sound at all.

This sense of the word crickets has yet to make the Oxford English Dictionary (though it surely will eventually). Still, it has plentiful coverage in Merriam-Webster, which added it to the dictionary in September 2023 with the definition “a conspicuous lack of response.” In discussing the term in a “Words We’re Watching” feature—which cites examples going back to the early 2000s—Merriam-Webster describes how crickets originally conveyed a sense of a rural setting:

“Crickets are often used by writers to convey atmosphere or to create a sense of place. That is, not the insects themselves, but rather the sound that crickets make. The chirping of crickets is the sound of nature on a summer night, and it has become a kind of cultural shorthand that indicates much with a single word: the setting is far from the city and far from people.”

The term seems to have evolved from senses indicating a rural setting—which is less noisy than the city by a lot—to any place or stretch of time quiet enough that, in theory, only the sound of crickets could be heard, as in this example from the 2007 novel Agnes and the Hitman: “There was a silence long enough to hear crickets in, and Agnes thought, If he makes some crack about me being not little, I’m gonna hit him again, and then he spoke.”


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