The NOUNs

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Back in June, I started a post with this sample of quoted phrases:

"Ask the gays what they think and what they do"
"The Muslims have to work with us"
"I will be phenomenal to the women"
"I think the Mexicans are going to end up loving Donald Trump"
"I'm the only one in the world who can raise almost $6 million for the veterans"
"People don't know how well we're doing with the Hispanics, the Latinos,"
"Well, what do we do with BET? Over there, the whites don't get any nominations."
"I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks."

These are all attributed to Donald Trump, and this aspect of his approach to the English language has been widely noted (e.g. here).

I've got audio verification only for a few of these examples, but despite the notorious inaccuracy of journalistic quotations, I'm inclined to believe that Trump really does refer to groups of people as "the Xs" more often than other public figures do.

But where I got stuck, three months ago, was in figuring out what's wrong with that.

In one sense, the answer is easy — talking about "the Xs" lumps a diverse group of people together as a homogeneous set, suggests an outlook friendly to essentialist stereotypes, etc.

But the trouble is, everybody does it. Some examples from a few minutes of searching back in June:

"Between the Borders", The Economist 2016: This was vetoed by the Americans and the British, partly because they worried that a poor, suppressed West Germany would either rebel or fall under Soviet influence.

Paul Krugman, "The Harm Germany Does", NYT 11/1/2013: The Germans are outraged, outraged at the U.S. Treasury department, whose Semiannual Report On International Economic And Exchange Rate Policies says some negative things about how German macroeconomic policy is affecting the world economy. German officials say that the report’s conclusions are “incomprehensible” — which is just bizarre, because they’re absolutely straightforward.

Bill Shea, "USS Detroit commissioning ceremony delayed until October", Crain's 6/16/2016:: The Detroit is the seventh U.S. Navy vessel to bear the city's name. The first was a 12-gun wooden ship built by the British at Malden, Canada, in 1813 and captured by the Americans during the Battle of Lake Erie on Sept. 10, 1813.

Stefan Bondy, "U.S. tops Paraguay, 1-0, to advance to quarterfinals of Copa America", NY Daily News 6/12/2016: Brazil indeed represents a possible next opponent in the quarterfinals of Copa America, a potential marquee matchup made possible by the Americans’ hard-fought victory Saturday, 1-0 over Paraguay, in the final game of group play.

Benjamin Lee, "Jackie Chan: Warcraft's success in China scares Americans", The Guardian 6/13/2016:  “Warcraft made 600m yuan [£64m] in two days. This has scared the Americans. If we can make a film that earns 10bn [£1bn], then people from all over the world who study film will learn Chinese, instead of us learning English.”

But maybe "everybody does it" differently. Those are all examples where X=Country Name. In some cases, the context is one where the named group really is acting as a unit: a government, a set of government officials,  a national military, a sports team. In the last example, there's an implicit team-like opposition:  the American film industry vs. the Chinese film industry.

In a quick scan of MEDLINE abstracts, I found that "the Xs" always seems to refer to a well-defined subset of a group of specified and individually-analyzed people:

Samuel Weisman, "Chest contour: A comparison of American and Russian Track Stars", California Medicine 1965: Measurement of the chests and other physical features of United States and Soviet Russian track and field stars showed the Americans broader chested, taller, lighter in weight and about two and a half years younger.

A.O. Williams et al., "Intestinal polyps in American negroes and Nigerian africans", British Journal of Cancer" 1975: The Nigerians were much the younger group (mostly under 20 years of age, whereas most of the American negroes were over 50) and far fewer of their polyps were truly neoplastic (7.5% compared with 87% of the Americans).

I. Winkler & W.J. Doherty, "Communication styles and marital satisfaction in Israeli and American couples", Family Process 1983: In spite of the close social ties of the two groups, we predicted that the conflict-related communication styles of the Israelis would be less calm and rational than those of the Americans and that such rational modes of communication would be positively associated with marital satisfaction for the Americans but not for the Israelis.

In that genre of writing, an author who was extrapolating about the general characteristics of a national group would refer to "Americans" or "Nigerians", not "the Americans" or "the Nigerians". Thus

C.W. O'Nell & N.D. O'Nell, "A cross-cultural comparison of aggression in dreams: Zapotecs and Americans", International Journal of Social Psychiatry 1977: A comparison was made between dreamed aggressions for Americans (Hall and Domhoff 1963) and for Zapotecs, collected and analysed by the writers.

I found a few examples in MEDLINE where "the Xs" is used to refer to unknown members of a generic national group — but these references were clearly somewhat hostile, e.g.

A 1973 letter to The Medical Journal of Australia: I viewed with some concern your leader of March 17, 1973, titled "Psychological Aspects of Vasectomy I", with particular reference to sperm banks. You stated sperm banks are operating in the U.S.A. and " … the introduction of sperm banks in Australia seems only a matter of time … a commercial venture which offers depositors a new type of life insurance … ". Surely there is no need to follow the Americans in everything. Are there to be no honest-to-goodness meaty performances left au naturel? Why commercialize one of the few remaining free permissive sports, subsidized though it may be ex parte? One feels that all conservationists will unite in opposing this monstrous editorial suggestion. The status quo is for us, thanks, We don't want your darn sperm banks.

And I have the impression that the same generalizations hold up when we look beyond X=Country Name to names of ethnicities, genders, etc. But I didn't have time to look into that, and I don't have time today. So I'll just throw the hypothesis open to discussion.

 



36 Comments

  1. Dr Cox said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 8:31 am

    Your ideas are interesting but I am not sure that I agree.
    I cannot imagine saying/writing 'French have a great tradition of haute cuisine' or 'French generally cook well'.
    I might, however, say/write 'Spaniards have a great tradition…' or 'Spaniards generally cook well'.
    I infer that it is the nature of the words 'French' and 'Spaniards' that is influencing my decision. 'Spaniard' is resoundingly a noun; 'French' sounds adjectival.
    A hasty thought, I welcome correction.

    [(myl) Your example seems right to me. But overall, things are a bit different for nationality-words that have no inflected plural form. So we can say "Americans like baseball" but not, I think, "British like cricket" — it would need to be "The British like cricket", or "British people like cricket".]

  2. Shira said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 8:44 am

    I would say that what's wrong with Trump's usage is that he distinguishes the X's from "us" — he implicitly excludes the X's from the ranks of "real Americans". That kind of distinction is not being made in either the journalistic or medical examples.

    [(myl) This doesn't seem to be true, at least across the board. There's no reason to think that Donald Trump excludes "the women" and "the whites" from the ranks of "real Americans".]

  3. Gerald Fay said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 9:02 am

    Pressed for time also, but here are a few documented "the" Trump usages- "…the Hispanics", "….the Evangelicals", "…the smartest people", "…the most loyal people", and the priceless "I love the poorly educated".

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpdt7omPoa0

    It suggests a "neat" compartmentalization, in my opinion, that may make the somewhat amorphous groups easier to deal with (for the speaker).

    More, perhaps, when time allows.

  4. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 9:07 am

    I clicked through to the abstract of the Winkler/Doherty piece, and it turns out that "the Israelis" were all "Israeli couples currently living in New York City" (thus rather unlikely to be a statistically valid cross-section of the broader population of Israeli couples) and "the Americans" were all couples "selected from the friendship circles of the Israeli couples" (likewise not likely to be a statistically valid cross-section of the broader population of American couples, most of whom on a nationwide basis are not socially close to Israeli-origin immigrants living in NYC). So maybe that makes sense in context (once you've defined things carefully enough, the X's and the Y's can be useful shorthand for "the subsets of our specific research group who are also X's/Y's, as explained above"). But it seems a different sort of usage than what Trump is being criticized for — although maybe that's the point that constructions of this sort may mean different things as used in different contexts for different purposes.

    And of course professional-journal abstracts (and even text) may tend to be written in a different register of English than the political rhetoric of even more-conventional-than-Trump candidates . . .

  5. Phillip Minden said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 9:34 am

    Big difference between a subgroup of a population (I'm popular with the Mexicans in New York) and the metaphorical use for a country's government etc (or national team) (The Mexicans declared war on the USA.)

  6. FM said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 9:42 am

    In one sense, the answer is easy — talking about "the Xs" lumps a diverse group of people together as a homogeneous set, suggests an outlook friendly to essentialist stereotypes, etc.

    To elaborate on this: in your examples with "the Germans", that always seemed to stand for a specific group of negotiators. Saying "the gays think X" implies that gay people as a group have a single opinion, perhaps through the Gay Parliament or something.

    Actually one time in college (nearly a decade ago, oh my!) a professor asked me what "the gay community" thought of some manufactured campus controversy. I was too inarticulate at the time to be properly offended by this opportunity to speak for The Gays, but it's stuck with me.

  7. Nick Dixon said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 9:56 am

    It bears comparison with another habit I've noticed: the tendency to use demonstrative pronouns apparently to declare distance between the speaker and the thing under discussion, most often when describing some disliked out-group, but also when describing things the speaker is unable or unwilling to understand.

    Anecdotally I've often heard people in Northern England talking about "these asians" or "them blacks" instead of simply "asians" or "blacks"; similarly "this Internet", or "that European Union" instead of using the definite article as everyone else does.

    It appears to be a linguistic way of holding something distasteful at arm's length to avoid contamination.

    I doubt it's used deliberately, but it comes out subconsciously; it's a dead giveaway that the speaker really doesn't like what she's talking about.

    I'd suggest that Trump's habitual "the" prefixing reveals the same disgust.

  8. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 9:59 am

    I think FM's anecdote is illuminating, because talking about "the gay community" or "the African-American community" seems in the abstract to have the same problems [specifically, conceptualizing a large group of individuals with varying interests/views/preferences/priorities as a homogeneous lump] as talking about "the gays" or "the blacks," yet the former usage is reasonably common in quote progressive unquote circles while the latter is deprecated. So something else is going on.

    If Trump said "I think the Chicano-American community* is going to end up loving Donald Trump," it seems like the stylistic (as perhaps opposed to substantive) objection would be successfully countered, doesn't it?

    *NB I will admit I haven't been spending enough time listening to NPR or following progressive websites to know if this is the most au courant form of words for the specific referent, but if it's not, substitute in whatever is.

    [(myl) Yes, this is another reason that I stalled on this post in June.

    Is there anything more than a politico-cultural difference between the resonances of "the gays" and "the gay community"? And what does this have to do with the lack of any non-ironic uses of "the white community" or "the woman community"?]

  9. Lee said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 10:25 am

    I see these types of examples breaking down four ways when contrasted with the way most politicians would refer to the same people:

    (1) Trump says "the Xs" to refer to a subpopulation of Americans where other politicians would typically say "X Americans" gay Americans, Muslim Americans, Mexican Americans, black Americans.

    (2) Trump says "the Xs" to refer to a subpopulation of Americans where other politicians would typically not refer to X but will, if they must, say "X Americans": white Americans.

    (3) Trump says "the Xs" to refer to a subpopulation of Americans where other politicians would typically say "Xs": veterans, women.

    (4) Trump and typical politician both say "the Xs" or "Xs" to refer to a subpopulation of Americans: criminals, drug dealers, rapists, terrorists.

    Hypothesis: Referring to a subpopulation of Americans as "the Xs" or "Xs" is typically avoided by politicians if X (or some peer group of X) is illegitimately despised by a non-trivial portion of the audience. This continuously reaffirms our solidarity (or at least affiliation) with and equal protection for group X (or some vulnerable peer group of X).

  10. Coby Lubliner said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 10:59 am

    In terms of affect (though not structure), saying "the X community" rather than "the Xs" strikes me as being on the same level as "people of color" rather than "colored people" or "children with autism" rather than "autistic children". I think this can legitimately be called political correctness.

  11. Lee said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 11:09 am

    A remarkable exception to Trump's pattern of "the Xs" was his RNC speech, where he referred to the "LGBTQ community" and "our LGBTQ citizens." It was also noteworthy because of that "Q" at the end of "LGBTQ." You will not find that Q in the speeches of center-left politicians like Clinton or Obama, and style guides for the mainstream press (e.g., NY Times, NY Post) generally prefer "LGBT" also.

  12. William Fitzgerald said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 11:36 am

    I was listening to (liberal radio show host) Diane Rehm today (a rebroadcast of a rebroadcast of a show on the Jim Crow south), and she referred to "the blacks," which took me by surprise a bit.

  13. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 11:37 am

    "I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees." Okay, or insensitive? Perhaps okay but solely because the intended audience is so young it might have difficulty following polysyllabic alternatives like "arboreal community"? Or alternatively okay because there's no practice of hostile/demeaning rhetoric toward "the trees"? (Members of the Logging-American Community tend to save their hostile/demeaning rhetoric for "the tree-huggers" instead.)

    [(myl) There's also the old ironic (?) "But is it good for the Jews?", which Stanley Fish claims to have experienced in his youth as "the paradigmatic question of identity politics".]

  14. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 12:16 pm

    I would take "Is it good for the Jews?" (ironic or otherwise) as an instance of the more general pattern that certain turns of phrase are okay for usage within the group but viewed as offensive when used by outsiders (and perhaps sometimes viewed as impolitic when within-group usage can be overheard by outsiders).

  15. Phillip Minden said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 2:11 pm

    I still haven't got used to "the blacks" and "the gays" as regular nouns with the plural -s. To me, that sounds not like "the Jews" but like "the Jewish".

  16. Pflaumbaum said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 2:42 pm

    @ Neil Dixon-

    Sounds like you're from that London ;)

  17. Éric Vinilo said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 2:49 pm

    “Chicano-American” is redundant, as a Chican@ is someone born in the United States of Mexican descent.

    Even so, the term may be a little dated as, anecdotally, it seems to me, fewer and fewer young Chicanos identify as such—with the Internet, increased post-NAFTA migration, many of the most popular Mexican pop culture products being produced on the northern side of the Rio Grande, etc. When you speak Spanish as a first language (even if English is your other L1), visit your parents’ town a couple times a year, chat with people in other U.S. and Mexican states, have a phone plan that lets you call them for a flat rate indiscrimiately, and are, for the most part, watching the same shows and listening to the same music as they are, the designation just seems less relevant.

    If push comes to shove I suppose most would think of themselves as Mexican-American, but I’ve talked to American-born activists who identify as Mexican. full-stop, passport notwithstanding.

    That’s not to say MEChA’s not still going strong and there aren’t some Latinos who came to the U.S. later in life who identify as Chicano and there aren’t numerous communities for whom Chicano culture isn’t still a strong factor but I think for a lot of people it comes off like Afro-American or “groovy, right on” (the most prominent Chicanos I can think of are Cheech Marin and Carlos Santana).

  18. D-AW said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 4:23 pm

    Someone once told me with no hint of irony at all that HIV was a big problem in the cat community (though she meant FIV).

  19. Lazar said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 6:10 pm

    To me, Trump's usages here also evoke a broader stereotype of old, out-of-touch people overusing definite articles – for example, "the Google" or "the Facebook". Or The Simpsons's take on Bill Cosby, from way back in 1995:

    "You see, the kids, they listen to the rap music, which gives them the brain damage, with their hippin' and the hoppin' and the bippin' and the boppin' – so they don't know what the jazz is all about!"

  20. Michael Watts said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 6:20 pm

    Hypothesis: Referring to a subpopulation of Americans as "the Xs" or "Xs" is typically avoided by politicians if X (or some peer group of X) is illegitimately despised by a non-trivial portion of the audience.

    Althought strictly it bears no plural marker, I think the common identifier "the rich" is enough to falsify this. I'd say it's more common that politicians refer to "the rich" because that subgroup is illegitimately despised by most of their audience.

    Which might be the implication people want to draw from Donald Trump using the same form to refer to "the blacks" and "the whites", although it would be odd to draw it about both of those groups.

    [(myl) Like "British" and "French", "rich" is one of the those (adjective-based) words that doesn't pluralize when used as a noun. You sometimes see "the riches" used ironically, though "the poors" is much more frequent.]

  21. Michael Watts said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 6:22 pm

    Disambiguative note: I meant 'using the same form [as "the rich"] to refer to "the blacks" and "the whites"', not 'using the same form [for two purposes, ] to refer to "the blacks" and "the whites"'. The thought is that "the rich" is often intended to be pejorative, so people want to read pejorative meaning into syntactically parallel forms.

  22. Mona Williams said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 8:02 pm

    Lazar:

    To me, Trump's usages here also evoke a broader stereotype of old, out-of-touch people overusing definite articles…

    Yes, I have always thought it was something like that. Whereas the out-of-touch person's "the" suggests distance and unfamiliarity, Trump's "the" seems a labored effort to treat the denoted group–necessarily distant– with delicacy and respect. This, to me, gives his game away, as it comes across as an overcorrection, with the obvious implication for his actual attitude to the group in question.

  23. Greg Malivuk said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 10:45 pm

    @Michael Watts:

    I don't think "the rich" is necessarily any more pejorative than "the poor" or "the young" or "the British". That's just the form we use for generic "X people" when X is an adjective that isn't also a pluralizable noun. For adjectives that are also nouns for individuals, we don't use "the" for the generic sense, hence sentences like, "The British say it this way while Americans say it that way."

    Trumpisms like "the women" and "the Mexicans" seem just plain ungrammatical if they're meant to be generic, while "the gays" and "the blacks" seem to be leaning toward the same pejorative connotations as "a gay" and "a black" used as singular nouns.

  24. Chris said,

    September 5, 2016 @ 10:50 pm

    I notice that, in contrast to current groups, historic groups seem to almost always require an article – "The Romans built this amphitheatre" sounds much more natural than "Romans built this amphitheatre"; "Western philosophy started with the ancient Greeks" sounds more natural than "Western philosophy started with ancient Greeks".

    Perhaps this is explained by the fact that infantilisation/simplification/generalisation about remote people is much more acceptable than for current people – e.g. "The Romans enjoyed eating doormice" seems a sensible comment to many people for whom "The Americans enjoy eating hamburgers" would seem like a generalisation.

  25. Stephen Goranson said,

    September 6, 2016 @ 3:32 am

    He's "the Donald."

  26. C said,

    September 6, 2016 @ 3:40 am

    @Dr Cox and myl
    re "So we can say "Americans like baseball" but not, I think, "British like cricket" — it would need to be "The British like cricket", or "British people like cricket"."

    True, but there's "Brits like cricket", which seems to support Dr Cox's hypothesis.

  27. speedwell said,

    September 6, 2016 @ 4:29 am

    D-AW, she probably meant something like "the problem of cats with [FIV] is a major issue in the cat fancy and cat rescue communities". I don't think she literally meant "the community consisting of cats".

  28. Rodger C said,

    September 6, 2016 @ 6:50 am

    If "the rich" sounds uniquely pejorative, I dare say it's simply because most references to "the rich" are unsympathetic. "He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich hath He sent empty away." It's hard for me, at least, to imagine generalizing about "the rich" (as opposed to "JOB CREATORS!!!") in any other tone.

  29. Gearóid Ó Fathaigh said,

    September 6, 2016 @ 7:38 am

    Wasn't Donald Trump's mother a native Scots Gaelic speaker? I know Irish Gaelic; and the connection is the first thing that popped into my head the minute I saw this post. The plural definite article is used a lot more in Gaelic languages!

    [(myl) Ah, those immigrants! Spoiling the pure indigenous culture.

    Pretty soon there'll be a haggis truck on every corner…]

  30. Rose Eneri said,

    September 6, 2016 @ 9:56 am

    I think it is possible that since Trump is running for elected office he thinks of people as votes and groups of people as voting blocks. The voting block idea is referenced by Stanley Fish in his comment about identity politics. (See myl's reply to J.W. Brewer's comment.) Since many people do seem to vote based on their identification with a group, for a politician to refer to them by group affiliation (the Blacks, the Jews, the woman) seems logical.

    For example, in the last 4 presidential elections, on average over 91% of Blacks voted for the Democrat (http://blackdemographics.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Black-Party-Affiliation-and-Vote-Patterns.jpg)

    and on average over 75% of Jews voted for the Democrat (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/jewvote.html).

    In addition, the 2012 presidential election Gallup polls showed the largest percentage gap in candidate support between male and female voters since Gallup began tracking this statistic in 1952 (http://www.gallup.com/poll/158588/gender-gap-2012-vote-largest-gallup-history.aspx)

    Of course, Trump's manner of speech could be nothing other than a habit formed long ago, maybe even something he learned from his parents, as Gearóid Ó Fathaigh speculated. It could, and probably does, signify absolutely nothing.

  31. BZ said,

    September 6, 2016 @ 11:50 am

    The reason "the white community" doesn't work is that whites are the majority in the United States, and there is really no meaningful sense of community that encompasses all or most whites. The reason "the woman community" doesn't work is that "community" cannot usually be modified by a noun. It would be something like "the community of women" which doesn't work for the same reason that "the white community" doesn't work.

    Then again, are those other communities really communities? And if they are (or are thought of as being), doesn't that lump all members into one community just as much as the others?

  32. Gwen Katz said,

    September 6, 2016 @ 12:44 pm

    "I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees." Okay, or insensitive? Perhaps okay but solely because the intended audience is so young it might have difficulty following polysyllabic alternatives like "arboreal community"? Or alternatively okay because there's no practice of hostile/demeaning rhetoric toward "the trees"? (Members of the Logging-American Community tend to save their hostile/demeaning rhetoric for "the tree-huggers" instead.)

    I think that one might be an exception; the Lorax can safely claim he's speaking for all the trees because it's unlikely there's some subset of trees that has a contrary opinion.

    D-AW, she probably meant something like "the problem of cats with [FIV] is a major issue in the cat fancy and cat rescue communities". I don't think she literally meant "the community consisting of cats".

    If you interpret "FIV is a problem in the cat community that way," it makes it sound like the cat fanciers have FIV!

  33. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 6, 2016 @ 1:43 pm

    "Jean-Paul knew what made New York great — it wasn't the Park Avenue crowd or the painters at the Cedar Tavern but the blacks, the Puerto Ricans, the gays, the hipsters, and the weirdos — and in 1974 we did an epic Esquire special together called "America Dances," showing how our various cultural tribes got down." — COCA hit from a 2011 Harper's Bazaar article about Jean-Paul Goude – can't figure out byline and/or whose voice the quote is in, but it doesn't seem derogatory in intent — and certainly it didn't strike whoever copy-edited the story as having so troubling a vibe it needed to be cleaned up before publication.

    COCA has lots and lots of hits for "the blacks," and probably other comparably arthrous bi-grams, so anyone with a theory about who does and doesn't use "the NOUNs" in what sort of context could perhaps do some field-testing of their theory by rummaging through those hits.

  34. Rodger C said,

    September 6, 2016 @ 1:50 pm

    @J. W. Brewer: I hear an implicit limitation in the topic that justifies the determiner: "the blacks [sc. in New York] etc."

  35. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 6, 2016 @ 2:04 pm

    Rodger C: okay, but presumably many/most of Trump's uses have an implicit "in the U.S." limitation, so you'd need to hypothesize some sort of polite-usage boundary that "in the U.S." and "in New York" are on opposite sides of.

  36. Rodger C said,

    September 7, 2016 @ 8:03 am

    @J. W. Brewer: I think the difference is that New York is explicitly mentioned in the example; also that "the Park Avenue crowd or the painters at the Cedar Tavern" primes the sentence for "the blacks" etc.

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