Quote:
Originally Posted by uke_master
I didn't respond to campfirewest at the time because maybe my initial guess was wrong. But then:
Turns out I correctly guessed that the way Luckbox would use "trans" in a sentence was "the trans". And I am thus also correct that "the blacks" was the appropriate comparison. Regardless, one ought to not say either of those expressions.
In the Dave Chappelle SNL piece that he did on Kayne, he said how you should never precede "the" with "Jews", and sure that's basically correct but because it's a living language rules are always meant to be broken.
I met this Israeli girl last month and I was asking her about what sort of stereotypes Israeli Jews had about American Jews (this is a true story), and what she said was that "the Jews in America are considered like spoiled princesses by Israeli Jews".
We can use the definite article there because we're talking about a set group of people. A similar sentence with "trans" could be something like "The trans in the Netherlands aren't really too keen on the trans from Belgium".
Note that this isn't the plural form, it's the collective. Compare: "I saw three Mongolians at the supermarket" (plural) with "The Mongolians here are a lot different than the Mongolians in Mongolia" (collective).
Now in some sentence with "the blacks", I agree that it's problematic but it's problematic because of issues dealing with racism. In an analogous sentence to the Mongolian example like "the blacks here are different from the blacks in Africa", the issue isn't that the sentence is grammatically incorrect, the issue is that it's semantically ridiculous because people who have darker colored skin aren't some unified group that can be made into a collective. So while saying "the Jews" or "the Mongolians" might oftentimes be antisemitic or anti-mongolian, it won't always be, whereas "the blacks" is always by definition going to be racist.
Last edited by Luckbox Inc; 02-16-2023 at 01:58 PM.