The French versus the Journalists

Plus, Founding Fathers versus Foundering Bothers

La Vache Qui Rit (The Laughing Cow). Poster by Benjamin Rabier, 1926. Image in public domain from Wikimedia Commons.

The language constabulary at the Associated Press (AP) endured an avalanche of mockery from the French and from the denizens of social media around the world. It all started when The AP Stylebook tweeted:

We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college educated.

So sorry. I’ll rewrite my opening sentence:

Persons engaged in constabularizing language at Persons Associatedly Pressed endured an avalanche of mockery from persons of Frenchness and from persons holding denizenship on social media around the world.

Oops. The expression “the world” dehumanizes our planet.

The AP’s tweet garnered tens of thousands of responses laughing at, not with, the AP. Après le déluge, the AP tweeted:

The use of “the French” in this tweet by @AP was inappropriate and has caused unintended offense. An updated tweet is coming.

The tweet didn’t cause offense—it caused gigatons of mirth. American comedian Jeremy McLellan said his favorite movie was “The Connection with Frenchness.” But the French response, like their food, was especially delicious. French people noted that the AP placed them between “the mentally ill” and “the disabled.” The French Embassy in Washington tweeted that they would now be the “Embassy of Frenchness in the US.”

A 1927 hit song proclaimed “Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong.” Today, there are 68 million French nationals, so their collective disdain for AP is 36 percent more authoritative than it would have been when Charles Lindbergh touched down at Aéroport Le Bourget.

Mind you, this ridicule comes from a country with a 388-year-old bureaucracy, L’Académie Française (The French Academy), specifically charged with curating their language. The members of L’Académie are known as «Les Immortels», which means “The Immortals”—not “persons immortalized.” Keep in mind, also, that these same 68 million people laughing at the AP once took to the barricades in the streets of Paris over whether to ban the Americanism “le hamburger” and replace it with «le steak de bœuf haché servi entre deux tranches de pain» (“chopped beefsteak served between two slices of bread”).

The French Academy, to its credit, includes poets, presidents, lawyers, generals, historians, scientists, clergymen, and philosophers, whereas the AP employees conducting The War on Definite Articles are more likely millennial J-school grads. But let’s suppose they succeed, forcing their exhausted enemies—people who actually speak English—to sign (definite) articles of surrender. The AP soldiers will find themselves brutally repelled should they attempt to land on the beaches of France. The French Language, you see, loves, loves, loves those definite articles.

Napoleon wasn’t Emperor of France, he was «Empereur des Français» (Emperor of the French). Unlike those AP-worthy Bourbons, Louis-Philippe wasn’t King of France. He was Roi des Français (King of the French)— a deliberate signal that his power was derived not from heredity or land ownership but, rather, from “the French” by way of their constitution.

In English, the AP can transform “the French” into “persons with Frenchness,” but, in French, transforming “the French” («les français») to “persons of Frenchness” will send the AP kids skittering for their safe spaces. The French translation, you see, would be «les personnes avec francité»—“the persons with Frenchness.” (This proclivity for definite articles was a running joke in Pepé le Pew cartoons before Pepé was carted off to bunk with Harvey Weinstein.)

I truly believe that centuries ago, the French Academy peppered their language with definite articles specifically because Nostradumus had predicted that doing so would offend American journalists centuries hence. But, hélas(!), the AP is not alone in this war.   

In 2021, the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges released their 54-page Ordinance of Mandatory Bowdlerization, formally titled, Advancing Health Equity. “The obese” would henceforth be “persons with obesity,” presumably because the latter construction is so much more flattering. “The homeless” would become “persons experiencing homelessness”—perhaps because forcing med students to use this awkward locution is a much cheaper solution than actually providing homeless people with warm beds and hot meals. The real result of all this, though, is to turn even the briefest conversation into an excruciating, time-gorging exercise akin to solving a New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle.  

In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges described a fictional land whose language had no nouns and which employed verb forms wherever English or Spanish would use nouns. Instead of “the moon rose above the river,” they would say the equivalent of, “upward behind the onstreaming, it mooned.” Borges wrote this to be provocative and humorous. Show his story to the AP folk, and they’ll set up a task force to implement it.

When I became a newspaper reporter in 1978, the 1977 United Press International Stylebook (written in coordination with AP) was a no-nonsense guide to usage, explaining, for example, the difference busing (transporting people via bus) and bussing (kissing). Thumbing through it in the newsroom one day, a satirical entry caught my eye—the only joke in the whole book. This particular entry said:

burro, burrow: A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist, you are expected to know the difference.

That expectation has long since lapsed.

Lagniappe

Founding Fathers versus Foundering Bothers

Lists like these have been circulating (and evolving) on social media, with readers welcome to make of them what they wish:

Ages on July 4, 1776: James Monroe (18), Aaron Burr (20), Alexander Hamilton (21), Betsy Ross (24), James Madison (25), Benjamin Rush (30), Elbridge Gerry (31), Thomas Jefferson (33), John Adams (40), John Hancock (40), George Washington (44), Benjamin Harrison V (50), Sam Adams (53), Benjamin Franklin (70).

Ages on February 4, 2023: Ron DeSantis (44) Hakeem Jeffries (52), Gavin Newsom (55) Kevin McCarthy (58), Chuck Schumer (72), Patty Murray (72), Hillary Clinton (75), Donald Trump (76), Mitch McConnell (80), Joe Biden (80), Bernie Sanders (81), Anthony Fauci (82), Nancy Pelosi (82), Chuck Grassley (89), Dianne Feinstein (89).

At age 69, I would have been a doddering elder among the 1776 group, Compared with 2023’s political leaders, I’d be an older member of their youth auxiliary.

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Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.