What does "he has come on gratingly folksy, dropping his G's" mean?

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Does it mean "he has been going on annoyingly (like a hick from Arkansas)..."? Whast does "dropping his G's" mean?

Context:
he team-building segment at the annual company meeting of Geomagic, Ping's software firm in Research Triangle Park, N.C., is not going well. The presenter has turned out to be a disappointment. Ping hired him to discuss results of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test, which 50 of her 70 employees have recently taken, but instead the man has burned an hour rehashing tired old management-guru dogma. Moreover, he has come on gratingly folksy, dropping his G's, making showy marks on the grease board, and concluding each point by demanding "Am I right?" in a not-quite-rhetorical fashion. Most annoyingly, he hasn't done his homework: He assumes he's the smartest person in the room, when the opposite is far more likely.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20051201/ping-fu.html

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[+3] - engineer - 02/05/2013Dropping his g's means that he is not pronouncing 'ing words correctly, pronouncing then "in" instead. This is supposd to give the impression that he is from a rural area. By 'ing words...

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@oristarA,

Dropping his g's means that he is not pronouncing 'ing words correctly, pronouncing then "in" instead. This is supposd to give the impression that he is from a rural area. By 'ing words I mean things like "going", "coming", "calling", etc.

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@oristarA,

This

Quote:

"Now I think y'all will agree with me that a person's gotta have meanin' in his life," the presenter goes on. "Everybody wants to live for somethin'--am I right?"

from your link is a great example of "gratingly folksy". Usually done by politicians when speaking to what they consider "plain working folks" that they want to identify with them. Most of us consider it insulting. It does grate.

I'm not familiar with "dropping his G's"

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@engineer,

I see. Thanks for the help on the g's.

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@roger,

roger wrote:

This
Quote:
"Now I think y'all will agree with me that a person's gotta have meanin' in his life," the presenter goes on. "Everybody wants to live for somethin'--am I right?"
from your link is a great example of "gratingly folksy". Usually done by politicians when speaking to what they consider "plain working folks" that they want to identify with them. Most of us consider it insulting. It does grate.

I'm not familiar with "dropping his G's"

Does "identify with them" mean "imitate them"?

1 Reply

Thank you both.

What does "the grease board" mean there?

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@oristarA,

Not quite. People might be more likely to vote for people who are part of their own group. The presenter in the article is trying to do the same, even though the audience does not get to vote.

A grease board is intended to be written on with grease pencils. They are erasable. In the past few years, white boards have become much more common, and grease pencils have been superceded by erasable marking pens.

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@engineer,

engineer wrote:

Dropping his g's means that he is not pronouncing 'ing words correctly, pronouncing then "in" instead. This is supposd to give the impression that he is from a rural area. By 'ing words I mean things like "going", "coming", "calling", etc.

If it was g's, there will be no problem for understanding. But G's? Why capitalized?

1 Reply

@oristarA,

I like his explanation of the meaning, but as to why The G was capitalized, and why there is an apostrophe before the s might not even be known to the writer. Some would use something like "g", but again, it's not really a quote anymore that the 's indicates a possessive.

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