AP again clarifies tweet advising that writing 'the French' is 'dehumanizing' | Hacker News Reader

AP again clarifies tweet advising that writing 'the French' is 'dehumanizing'

lemonde.fr

17 pointsTomte28 comments

Instead of saying the French, we should say “people of croissants”

As a French man and thus officially representing France, I love your suggestion and shall use it a lot on the internet.

That'd be rather "islamophobic" as well as an example of cultural appropriation, now wouldn't it? Croissants got their half-moon shape after the half-moon on the flag of the Ottoman empire (i.e. the Turkish flag) in celebration of beating off the Ottoman siege of Vienna. The story goes that its origins date from 1683 when Vienna was under siege by the Ottomans. The Grand Vizir decided to invade the town by digging underground tunnels beneath its foundations but one of the tunnels was dug close to a bakery. The bakers alerted the Viennese guard who sounded the alarm and the invasion attempt was thwarted whereupon the Ottomans lifted the siege and left the outskirts of the town. The Viennese decided to celebrate this by creating a new pastry symbolising the depiction of the crescent moon on the Ottoman flag, hence the name “croissant”.

the more popular "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys"

I know the French bit (and college educated bit!) is the part that caused the humor/uproar, but I don't understand the recommendation by AP. I'm assuming using "the" with some group is perceived at making that group an other/lesser group. and switching to "people with" is meant to correct that.

if that's the reasoning, i don't see how that buys you anything.

i get that some speech can be reprehensible, but in this case it seems that the the pejorative implications of the language are imbued by people's intentions, not the words themselves. so in a few years, ap will be telling me that "people with" is also marginalizing.

howver, i could be one of "the ignorant" on this topic.

>by AP

you mean the ap

This is called the "Euphemism treadmill": http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2020/08/ableist-language-and-th...

Never heard of that phrase, but it's great. Thank you.

Does that really apply here?

In euphemism treadmill it looks like a word gets replaced because a secondary derogatory or offensive meaning of it comes to dominate with the general public and so the word in its original, often technical, use gets replaced.

E.g., "retarded" was originally a medical term, became a general purpose derogatory word, and then medicine switched to something else because of that.

In all the examples given on that page this replacement happens.

That's not what is happening in the AP guide changes. E.g., when they say don't use "the poor" they aren't saying to no longer use the word "poor". They are saying to say "poor people" or "people who are poor" instead of "the poor".

I disagree.

I don't see the difference between "the poor" and "people who are poor." As described in the cambridgeblog post, the problem is the underlying issue (e.g., being poor), not necessarily the phrases used to describe the issue.

I suppose you can say that, as time progresses, certain terms are saddled with unnecessary pejorative baggage (e.g., "retarded"), so I can understand the desire to swap in a new term that doesn't have the baggage. But sometimes it seems that the difference is so fine (e.g., between "the poor" and "poor people") that I don't have the resolving power to tell the difference.

It seems like a consistency improvement. Once upon a time terms like “Chinamen” were considered acceptable, but then we started to frown on those forms for marginalized groups. Ditto for phrases like “the Blacks.”

The problem is that this left a bunch of related forms around, like Frenchmen and “Whites.” I can only speak for myself, but I internally recoil when surveys refer to “Whites.”

This stance seems like it just improves consistency. Now we’ve got Chinese People, French people, Black people, and White people. This doesn’t seem like it should irritate anyone.

In cricket, we used to have a type of bowler called the left arm chinaman. There haven't been too many chinamen bowlers over the years, so I couldn't recall when I'd last seen the term. Not surprisingly, I find now that it has been renamed to left arm unorthodox spin.

It's attempting to generalize where generalization is a bad idea.

"The French" is not on the same level as "the Jews". They didn't even note that there is a difference. How can they be a claim to be an authority in this area?

This tweet has caused a lot more offence in America, than it has in France.

To be honest, I don't think anyone around me have read this ridiculous article and it's for the better. It was posted on Friday, and people are enjoying their week-end today, I only stumbled upon it because it's on Hacker News.

I'm dumbfounded that a journalist wasted a few hours writing his thoughts on a tiny shitfest from Twitter.

I'm not sure if much of it is actual offence and how much is just mocking it?

I can't really tell... For instance, I initially thought the tweet was a joke, but apparently it was serious.

The poor, the mentally ill, the Associated Press.

In short, in a list of examples of language of the form "the X" that AP would prefer be replaced with something like "X person" or "person with X" one of the examples was "the French".

This is funny because most of the examples were things that you generally do not want to be, such as "poor", "disabled", and "mentally ill" so it kind of suggests that being French is a bad thing.

Aside from the poor choice of examples, the underlying point is fairly valid. "The X" does place the emphasis on the group of people having/with/in X, so when you are not talking about something that really does apply to everyone who has/is X it is the wrong emphasis.

That's why I've always been a bit puzzled by "people of color" as a replacement for the older "colored people". I'm not saying "colored people" didn't need to be replaced, because it did due to its strong association with past massive legalized discrimination against Black people, but I don't see how "people of color" got the nod.

In general "people of <noun>" sounds to me like it has the same misplaced emphasis as "the <noun>".

That's fine if we are talking about something like the Borg where it is the collective that matters and the people that make it up are just interchangeable resources beholden to the collective's will.

Compare to "<adjective> people". The emphasis there is on people who happen to be described by that adjective.

Don't get me wrong, I'm much more anti-woke than the average HNer, but there appears to be something to this, at least in my head.

In imagining what I would call various Europeans, I would probably say Germans or English people or Italians, or people from Spain, but I would definitely say the French and there seems to be some hint of negativity to it.

My perception of the French (there it is!) is that they are haughty and condescending, especially of americans. I also carry some patronizing admonition about their military role in the world wars.

You can criticize this for being preconceived and ignorant - you'd probably be right. I'm not rationally arguing, just exploring my own headspace and finding some emotional validity in TFA. It would be woke garbage to make the claim that prefixing "the" in front of everyone is dehumanizing, but I at least only do that selectively with the apparent intent to marginalize.

> In imagining what I would call various Europeans, I would probably say Germans or English people or Italians, or people from Spain, but I would definitely say the French and there seems to be some hint of negativity to it.

Really?

To me "The English love tea" and "English people love tea" are pretty reasonable.

Similarly, "French people love eating croissants" or "The French love croissants" both sound reasonable.

etc.

I think part of why so many people are dunking on it is, while you can say "take care to avoid dehumanizing", considering "the French" as dehumanizing seems like care beyond any real practicality.

You're slightly more woke than you think you are if you didn't immediately reach for "frog".

(joking, but people use to just refer to people from other countries by slurs all the time, and this has greatly reduced in my sight in recent years)

As a French person, I would say that the French are not yet stupid enough to be offended by this compared to the person pushing for this change.

What if someone is poor, disabled, and also French, what should they call themselves?

Miserable? I stole that from a Tweet cited in the article, tgat summed up the original AP examples as "just another way to describe all the characters in Les Miserables". Propably the most brilliant reaction to that section of APs style book tweet.

> the poor, the mentally ill, the French

And that's why we riot all the time.

Wokeness knows no bounds

True. You can call anything woke.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com