gay peop- sorry, i mean people with gay
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RT @APStylebook
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.
https://twitter.com/APStylebook/status/1618658301750689792
it kinda reminds me of the n-word observation where:
"obese" is not like the n-word because we say obese and we call the n-word the n-word
our language around things will never fully obey our desires for political action
you would never say "people with frenchness"
you would say french people
because "people with frenchness" implies frenchness is bad
which is the whole problem in the first place
everything in our language has markers about how we feel about it, and trying to fully circumvent those markers will never work (nor should it!), because it feels too unnatural to adjust
hmm now im wondering if this is historically blind. idk how much political work was actually done by people to get everyone to not say e.g. the n-word
but i do know that work wasn't done by AP news lol
thinking on it more, the striking part of this tweet is its attempt to make a general rule out of a situation that really only makes sense for marginalized classes of people
yeah, it's bad to reduce _some_ people to _some_ parts of their identity. but not everyone for all parts!
now that i've talked it out of my system i fully don't care anymore and think the original AP tweet is basically fine in terms of content
it's just worded poorly
if the culture reallllllly changes, so too will the language. but not until then.