Grimmigirl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today we're going to talk about whether it's dehumanizing to refer to people in France as the French, seriously.

And then we'll talk about the phrase out over your skis and the apostrophe in the company name, Land and...

A listener on Mastodon asked what I think about the kerfuffle over the AP style book suggesting that it might be dehumanizing to use the phrase the French.

And if you miss the whole thing, one, I'm actually very happy for you, and two, here's the background.

In its relatively new section on inclusive storytelling, the AP style books says, quote, don't use dehumanizing the terms, such as the homeless, the blind, the mentally ill, the poor, etc.

Unquote. Note that there is no mention of the French. And here's a short part of what the style book says about inclusive storytelling.

It's about quote, the stories we choose to convey, the sources we talk with, the images we select, the framing, approach, and specific words we use, the details we include or don't include,

and the understanding that all those various parts of a story can be seen and interpreted very differently depending on a person's background and experiences.

The way I think about their published advice, not to use phrases such as the homeless and the blind, is that those phrases can sound othering, like none of you are homeless, but those homeless people who aren't you, do something we're talking about.

And those phrases can also result in over generalizations, which is something I've become a lot more aware of in my own writing over the years.

For example, I don't recall ever writing about homeless people or poor people, but I do write about British English and American English all the time.

And for the last few years when I update old articles, I often change wording from something like, learn with a T is the British spelling.

Just something like, the learnt with a T is spelling is more common in Britain, because to say that everyone who uses British English spells it that way would be an over generalization, and it's just not true, it's just more common in Britain.

So when you're saying the homeless or the mentally ill do something or believe something, you're saying everyone who is homeless or mentally ill does something or believes something, which is almost certainly not true,

because no group is that homogeneous. So when you find yourself using those phrases, it's a great time to check your wording.

For example, instead of writing something like, the poor by cake mix because it provides a good calorie per dollar value, you might write something like, some people with an income below the poverty line have described consciously buying cake mix because it gives them a lot of calories per dollar.

And it's also important to consider the context because this kind of phrase can be a lot more dehumanizing in some instances than others.

Patty Boyd, owner of Steel Pencil Editorial who I was chatting with about this online, pointed out that the objection is primarily when what follows as an adjective turned into a noun.

That labels such as the disabled, the blind, the poor, the intuitive, and the hard working are different from simple nouns such as the baristas, the farm workers, and the editors.

She wrote, compare some of the disabled have made great strides in blah, blah, blah, and some of the disabled people at Chi Chi's couldn't use the downstairs bathroom.

So even though the is used in both, one uses disabled as a dehumanizing lump, but the second one is an adjective descriptor before the word people.

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