"People"

I think the english language needs a new word for "people". It feels like the word is tossed around too easily and leads to way too many over generalizations.

Hypothetical situation - Someone goes to wal-mart and the person working at the register accidentally rings up something twice. The person gets home, finds out about it, then proceeds to tell everyone they know "GOD!! the PEOPLE at wal-mart are so stupid".

Woah there, only one person messed up. Yet this kind of thing somehow seeped its way into the english language. It seems pretty wrong to me.

I need to think up a new word for this =P

A new word for what?

If the problem is generalizing, his saying ""GOD!! the MORONS at wal-mart are so stupid" would not make it any better (unless you decide that since you work at wal-mart but are not a moron, you need not take offense... yeah, right).

If the problem is not the generalizing... what is it, exactly?

A worse use of the word "people" is when the person they're referring to is in earshot and knows for sure it's them that they're referring to.

I think it's the generalization that's the problem, not the word.

Yah, over generalization is the problem, I guess "people" is just the word I hear most commonly used to make the over generalizations

When my dad is getting annoyed at my brother he says "they", which always annoys me. Knowing that it is obviously me

The whole language is full of words like that.

Nope. Deal with it.

Yeah, my dad used to use the plural "you" (it's different in portuguese) a lot when only one of us two had done something wrong. It's very irritating.