On Thursday, the Associated Press Stylebook issued the following statement: “We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college-educated. Instead, use wording such as people with mental illnesses. And use these descriptions only when clearly relevant.” A hilarious backlash ensued, especially about “the French”: The French Embassy suggested that it might now be “Embassy of Frenchness in the US,” and many French people were up in arms, not just nationalistic figures like Éric Zemmour, who tweeted simply, “We are the French.” By the next day, the AP had deleted the original tweet, while still doubling down: “Writing French people, French citizens, etc., is good. But ‘the’ terms for any people can sound dehumanizing and imply a monolith rather than diverse individuals.”
A phrase like “the French” contains what linguists call a substantivized adjective: The addition of the definite article “the”—a word that holds for me a special fascination—takes the adjective “French” and turns it into a noun. In particular, it turns it into a plural noun, which is why “the French love camembert” is grammatical while “the French loves camembert” is not. We may contrast this with the main other substantive use of “the,” which is to indicate abstractions: “The French delight in the good.”
A number of national adjectives work the way “French” does: We speak of “the English,” “the Chinese,” and for that matter “the Navajo” (though “the Navajos” is also possible). But then there are adjectives that require the suffix “-s” to indicate plurality: “the Americans” and “the Finns,” for instance. The reasons for the discrepancy would require a scholarly paper: Language can be messy! The point is that if you speak of “the American” or “the Finn,” either you are referring to a specific person or you sound as though you are from another century, as in Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s famous statement, “The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles.”
The AP’s examples are all of the first type, but it is difficult to imagine that the recommendation applies only to these. It is true that, when used of people, substantivized adjectives in English give us generalizations: To say that “the French love camembert” is to suggest that everyone who is French loves camembert, which is obviously not the case. But this is true of all substantivized adjectives: The claim “the Americans love hamburgers” is false in the same way. (When used to express a generality, substantives of national adjectives that have plurals in “-s” are more common without the definite article: “Americans love hamburgers.” But that is a subject for another day.)
The grandees at the AP seem to believe that if you replace “the French” with “French people,” without “the,” you are somehow humanizing them. This is sophistry: No one fails to think of French people when confronted with “the French love camembert.” Still, there is a more serious problem. The claim that “French people love camembert” is an untrue generalization of exactly the same kind as “the French love camembert.”
This also holds, of course, for “the poor”—and, for that matter, “the rich.” Compare “the poor do not vacation in Aspen” and “poor people do not vacation in Aspen”; compare “the rich vacation in Aspen” and “rich people vacation in Aspen.”
Here’s what the AP gets right: Reporters should try not to generalize. When they write articles about les français, they should qualify their claims, perhaps with an adverb (“the French generally love camembert”), perhaps by distancing themselves from the statement (“it is often said that the French love camembert”). But this has nothing to do with “the.” If they insist on using two words when one will do, they should write “French people generally love camembert” or “it is often said that French people love camembert”—as well as “poor people do not usually vacation in Aspen” and “Thurston Howell III informed the group that poor people do not vacation in Aspen.”
We are growing accustomed to impositions of “new principles.” Just a few days earlier, it was reported that three museums in the United Kingdom, including the British Museum, now recommend using “mummified person” rather than “mummy” because the latter is (to quote a spokeswoman for National Museums Scotland) “dehumanizing” while the former “encourages our visitors to think of the individual.” It’s easy to laugh, but as my AEI colleague Jonah Goldberg points out, when a heavyweight acts as linguistic enforcer, there are consequences for us all.
“The French are a great people” and “French people are great.” These two sentences do not mean the same thing, but in my experience, both are generally true. Allez les Bleus!
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