I often use the word people to mean multiple persons. However, I’ve noticed that sometimes people will laugh/smirk when I use it. For example, one time I was talking about how my sister and her family/household travel often, saying, “Those people travel a lot,” and the person repeated those people and gave a slight laugh. I’m wondering if I may be giving some sort of unintentional implied message when I use that word.
Does the word people mean anything other than multiple persons, such as a group of persons united by a common identity (family, experience, nationality, ethnicity, etc.)?
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Dude.
As a third-party to this conversation, I have to say that the dude writing “There is often a gap between common-use language, and the academic function of words (see “racism”). This is why I emphasized the relation of the definitions I provided to the fields of anthropology and sociology, as well as why I stated it is a use almost exclusively found, in my experiences, in academia.” seems a tad more credible than the one writing “I’m not superior just because I used a dictionary to quash the logical fallacy of your call to authority.”
I seriously think you just missed the nuance he was trying to emphasise, and you started mansplaining something he already implicitly had agreed on. Now you’re going for these rather immature “logical fallacy” arguments. Just a tip for that, btw, to up your game in that aspect. Naming fallacies to implicate that the other person is wrong is actually something called “the fallacy fallacy”, ie "because their logic contains a fallacy, the conclusion must be false. That in itself is a fallacy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
So yeah. You’re not wrong, but you’re also not right in correcting him in any way, and he’s not wrong to say that he is right.
I do believe he’s an English teacher. Just use your imagination a bit and think of how many of the things your English teacher told you didn’t seem to make sense, but when you actually dug into the material, you got an “aaa this is what he meant” - moment.
Listen, man, I can get stuff wrong sometimes. I’m still not convinced I am in this case, but, even if I am off on one very specific niche use of a word that rarely, if ever, comes up, attacking my entire livelihood over it, as though it defines every facet of teaching English, is an insane overstep.
I am not so arrogant as to assume words can only ever have one meaning, nor to attack a stranger on the internet over a disagreement on that meaning. I have also made no such logical fallacy. You asked if I was “sure”, and followed up with a suggestion that I had never spoken with a native English speaker. I said yes, I am confident, and then offered up my background as evidence that, at the very least, your assessment on my experiences is incorrect. I can see how you could conflate that as a call to authority, and perhaps should have phrased things in such a way that doesn’t leave room for such assumptions. That said, I’d advise against jumping down people’s throats based on assumptions, else you’ll end up doing things like building a strawman argument, while simultaneously accusing others of logical fallicies.
I’m done with this. The level of vitriol this discussion has been laced with is unwarrented and suggests that any further conversation is a waste of time. This entire disagreement should have been:
“Hey, I think X is right.”
“Well, this says Y is right, so you must be wrong.”
“I mean language is funky and weird, a lot of words mean different things in different spaces, so whatever.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
Everything beyond that was grossly unnessecary, terminally online, internet arrogance that we’d both be better off without.