Plainspeaking-Phobic

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In a biography of Napoleon I'm listening to, the author describes tensions between France and England in terms of the French being "anglophobic" or the English being "francophobic".

The words certainly aren't used to mean that the French people feared the English; and the English people, the French.

Rather, I think the author intends to turn his nose up to the idea that people of two countries dislike each other enough to go to war. And that might be an opinion worth considering. But why call that animosity a phobia? It just clouds historical thinking with contemporary newspeak.

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