folks

   A collective term of address which implies that the company is included in the speaker’s intimate circle of friends, or is part of his family. In the USA in the nineteenth cen tury it could also imply that the people so addressed were eminently respectable, since that was a meaning the word acquired.

   Its proper use as a vocative is shown in Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis, where Babbitt himself uses it to address his friends and neighbours who are paying a social visit. It is used more generally by speakers who are trying to evoke a friendly response. Thus a radio announcer in The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West, holds out his microphone to pick up the background noise and says: ‘Did you hear it? It’s a bedlam, folks.’ The term would not be used in formal circumstances.