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.)?
The vast majority of the time ‘they’ or ‘them’ works in the same sentence as ‘those people’ when refering a goup since you already need context for who you are referring to. I can’t even think of an example where they or them doesn’t fit.
Description of a group of white people from Georgia.
I heard they like fried chicken.
I heard those people like fried chicken.
Hell, the second one sounds racist even after making it clear I was talking about white people, and I typed the words!
This must be an American thing because adding those doesn’t suddenly make a sentence sound more racist to me or have any connotations.
I can hear it and am not American.
Try snubbing your nose while saying"those people"
I can’t think of any sayings or phrasings that would be universal across the entire globe.