Found on 2026-10-10 by a search the owner asked for: a change of audience without translation in which the wording is identical, the condition CASE-064 fails because its token is a photograph. The owner suggested slang and coded in-group language, and TV Tropes’s lists, as places to look. The lists are described below as a pool of items, not as evidence.
The case
The source wording. “Power in the Blood”, by Lewis E. Jones (1899), is a gospel hymn printed in 467 hymnals. Its refrain begins “There is power, power, wonder working power” and goes on “in the blood of the Lamb” (hymnary.org, refrain first line).
The same wording before a new audience. George W. Bush, State of the Union, 28 January 2003, on the White House’s transcript: “Yet there’s power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people.” The phrase is verbatim from the hymn. It was spoken to a national audience that was not a congregation.
Uptake by the in-group. James Heflin, the son of a Baptist minister, writing in April 2003, recognised the line (“I know it well”) and took it as Bush “stealthily passing the message to the flock, to my flock”.
Uptake by the out-group. Timothy Noah (Slate, October 2004), who learned the reading from others, wrote that the phrase refers to “the power of Christ, though Bush used it in a seemingly secular context”, and that such phrases deliver “a religious message over the heads of plodding secular humanists like me.” Jennifer Saul’s analysis (2016 draft, p. 4): “To a non-fundamentalist this is an ordinary piece of fluffy political boilerplate, which passes without notice. But a fundamentalist Christian will hear the dogwhistle.” She separates two in-group messages, a religious content and the fact “that Bush does speak their idiolect—indicating that he is one of them.”
Uptake measured. Bethany Albertson (Political Behavior, 2015) tested “multivocal and obvious religious appeals experimentally with two national samples: an ingroup that understands the religious connotations in a multivocal appeal and a religiously diverse outgroup that does not.” “Religious appeals are persuasive for the ingroup … while the religious meaning in a multivocal appeal eludes them” (abstract). Norma Mendoza-Denton (Dædalus, 2023) reports her result on this phrase: “89 percent of Pentecostals recognized the reference as coming from a well-known church hymn … only 9 percent of a more general subject population.” That figure is a secondary report; the article itself was not read.
What is held fixed is the wording: one sentence, and in it a phrase carried verbatim from the hymn. What differs is the audience: those who sing the hymn, and the rest of a national audience.
What it can show
That with the wording held fixed, which act a hearer takes an utterance to perform depends on the hearer’s relation to a practice the words come from. For the hymn’s singers the sentence is an appeal to shared faith and a sign of membership (Saul’s second message). For others it is secular praise of the public. Both audiences’ uptake is documented independently of the speaker and of the record, and the split was measured.
That is CLAIM-224’s point met without translation and without any change of token. CLAIM-151 version 2 answers the objection by making the constituents relations to participant roles, so that a new audience in the same role keeps them. Here the two audiences hear one token at once, and the role the speaker addresses (“the flock”) is held only by those who know the hymn. Nothing in the words tells a hearer which role he is in. It is the residue the objection keeps open, whether the norms that define the role are shared, shown inside one language and one broadcast.
It is a variant of CASE-064 in two respects: the token is words, not an image, and the speaker made the split on purpose. It illustrates and bears no weight.
What it cannot show
The condition it meets only partly: a change of audience. The phrase moves from congregational singing to a national broadcast, but the speech’s audience is mixed at once rather than changed afterwards, as Lindsey Stone’s was. And the split is designed. A dog whistle is a deliberate collapse of contexts, not an accidental one.
The strongest reply. The speaker intended both readings. An intention-based account (CLAIM-221) says this was one act, a multivocal appeal, and the two audiences recovered different parts of it. On that reading the audiences differ in what they recognise, not in a verdict on which act was done, and the case shows that uptake moves with the audience, not that the audience’s role constitutes the act. Albertson measures recognition and persuasion, not act category.
The outgroup uptake is thin as testimony. Noah writes as an outsider who had been told the reading; Saul’s sentence is an analyst’s claim. Only the experiment measures the outgroup, and its stimulus and figures are unverified (see Sources).
What would close the gap. A reader test that holds the sentence fixed and varies only whether the reader knows the hymn, as a change of situation, do(S), rather than an instruction, do(I) (CLAIM-130): one group hears the hymn’s refrain first, one does not, one is told “this is a hymn phrase”. Raters judge the act category (religious appeal, secular praise, sign of membership) separately from recognition of the source and from the intention they attribute. The sentence, with and without its hymn context, could be an item in the no-rendering arm of CASE-055.
A pool of items: TV Tropes’s audience-split lists
TV Tropes (CASE-038) keeps lists of lines whose force splits by audience. tvtropes.org returned 403 to scripted requests on 2026-10-10 and the archives were unreachable from the search’s environment, so the lists were read on Tropedia (tropedia.fandom.com), a fan-run fork of TV Tropes, through its ordinary API. Whether Tropedia’s text matches today’s TV Tropes is unverified. Counts are example lines at the first and second level of the page.
- Have a Gay Old Time. “Language drift … causes a word or phrase originally intended as wholly innocuous to be potentially taken as startling, confusing or just plain funny in a different time or place.” Named for the last line of The Flintstones theme. Identical wording, an audience changed by time. About 440 and 290 lines.
- Parental Bonus. “A joke on a children’s TV show that children of the appropriate age would likely never get, but which their parents would.” One token, two audiences at once, split by age. About 130 and 330 lines.
- Getting Crap Past the Radar. Lines meant to “sneak some manner of profanity or other forbidden material past the network censors”. The censor is the audience that misses it. Examples are mostly on subpages, not read. Tropedia’s Round the Horne page files Julian and Sandy’s Polari here, the slang case the owner had in mind; the documentation for it is Paul Baker’s work, not read.
- Bilingual Bonus. Messages “available only to those viewers … that have sufficient knowledge of the language in question”. One token, split by language.
- Values Dissonance. Tropes that “don’t travel - or age - very well”. An index, not item-level.
What they offer: hundreds of naturally occurring lines with identical wording and a named pair of audiences. What they lack: any record of either audience’s uptake. Each split is asserted by an editor who belongs to the knowing audience, few entries cite anything, and descriptions are written to fit examples (ARG-014). They are candidates, not evidence. For CASE-055 they could supply items for an arm with no rendering: lines drawn by a stated sampling rule, the hearer’s membership in the knowing audience varied as a situation, and the act labelled by raters who did not select the items. Parental Bonus and Bilingual Bonus are closest to CLAIM-224 (one token, two audiences at once); Have a Gay Old Time is cleanest on identical wording.
Sources
- G. W. Bush, “President Delivers ‘State of the Union’”, 28 January 2003, White House archive, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html. Read directly; the sentence was checked verbatim on 2026-10-10.
- L. E. Jones, “Power in the Blood” (1899), hymnary.org, https://hymnary.org/text/would_you_be_free_from_your_burden_of_si. Read directly (author, date, first line, refrain first line, count of hymnals).
- B. L. Albertson, “Dog-Whistle Politics: Multivocal Communication and Religious Appeals”, Political Behavior 37(1) (2015), 3–26, DOI 10.1007/s11109-013-9265-x; correction DOI 10.1007/s11109-019-09568-3 (2019). Abstract read directly (springerprofessional.de). Full text not reached. Unverified: the stimulus wording (whether it used Bush’s sentence or a constructed speech with the phrase), the samples, and the figures. The correction is reported to fix the speech’s year to 2003; its text was not read.
- N. Mendoza-Denton, “Currents of Innuendo Converge on an American Path to Political Hate”, Dædalus 152(3) (2023), 194–211, DOI 10.1162/daed_a_02026. Read directly; the source of the 89 and 9 percent figures, as a secondary report of Albertson.
- J. Saul, “Dogwhistles, Political Manipulation, and Philosophy of Language”, in D. Fogal, D. W. Harris and M. Moss (eds.), New Work on Speech Acts (Oxford University Press, 2018), DOI 10.1093/oso/9780198738831.003.0013. Read in a 2016 draft (Warwick, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/people/eqandwelfare/map/saul_dogwhistles_political_manipulation_and_philosophy_of_language.pdf, pp. 4–5); the published wording and pages are unverified.
- J. Heflin, “Wonder-Working Power”, Valley Advocate, reprinted on AlterNet, 17 April 2003, https://www.alternet.org/2003/04/wonder-working_power. Read through a fetch summary that quoted the phrases given; not read verbatim in full.
- T. Noah, “Why Bush Opposes Dred Scott”, Slate, 11 October 2004, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/10/why-bush-opposes-dred-scott.html. Read through a fetch summary that quoted the phrases given; not read verbatim in full.
- Tropedia, pages “Have a Gay Old Time”, “Parental Bonus”, “Getting Crap Past the Radar”, “Bilingual Bonus”, “Values Dissonance” and “Round the Horne”, https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/Have_a_Gay_Old_Time and siblings. Read directly through the MediaWiki API. The TV Tropes originals (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HaveAGayOldTime and siblings) were not reached.
- P. Baker, Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men (Routledge, 2002), ISBN 0415261805. Not read; cited only as where the Julian and Sandy evidence would be found.
Note of 2026-10-10: an unintended-reading case
The owner pointed out that this case’s strongest reply is decisive for its use: the speaker intended both readings, so an intention-based account (CLAIM-221) can call it one multivocal act. A further search, which the owner asked for, found a case in which the second reading was not intended: CASE-073, the Kia Provo (2013). A concept-car name, coined “from the word ‘provoke’”, was a blank to the motor press and was taken in Northern Ireland as honouring the Provisional IRA. Kia declared no such intention and withdrew the name for the UK and Ireland. It is filed as a variant of CASE-064, not of this case. This case keeps the verbal, deliberate instance; the new one is the verbal, accidental one. The new case’s collision is inside English, so it does not supply a change of language either.