You are right. Turning an adjective into a noun tends to make it more degrading because you’ve focused on the characteristic rather than the person. That’s why referring to people as “blacks” or “females” feels icky. It’s why we saw “deaf people” and not “the deafs” or “old people” and not “the olds.”
You are right. Turning an adjective into a noun tends to make it more degrading because you’ve focused on the characteristic rather than the person. That’s why referring to people as “blacks” or “females” feels icky. It’s why we saw “deaf people” and not “the deafs” or “old people” and not “the olds.”
But the only reason we don’t talk about the poors that way is because we can legally destroy where they sleep and run them out of town :)
Those Olds really are fucking things up around here tho