Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Your argument makes complete sense to me -- there seems a difference between fear and hate (there could be a psychological question here as to whether those are, in fact, different emotions, but, since they are different words, let's say that they are). The suffix "-phobe", however, denotes either "fear of" or "hate of" (or "aversion to" or "dislike of," whatever; sometimes it is not necessarily as strong as hate).

So, alweiss, to put together what I said above and what Ron Draney said, since there is no word "misfranco" that would more explicitly mean "one who hates France or things French," Francophobe probably will have to do. And, as Ron said, it's about avoiding the thing; if the difference between hate and fear is important, then that should probably just be said explicitly (e.g., "I'm a Francophobe — it's not just that I fear French people; I actually detest them." (not my sentiments, but just as an example)).

By the way, in my post above I incorrectly correlated the suffix "-phobe" to "fear of" or "hate of," but the suffix "-phobe" actually denotes "one who fears" or "one who hates" that which the root word represents. The suffix "-phobia" means "fear of" or "hate of." Just wanted to correct myself.