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

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 " sounds to me like it has the same misplaced emphasis as "the ".

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

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

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.

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.