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Linguistic Colonialization
My biggest pet peeve in the last two years is the term “Latinx.” It is the most ignorant neologism that I can think of from the last round of language revisions in the past few years.
I teach Latin, and so I am used to a gender structure to language. But I didn’t start out the way. My primary language is English, and most words in this language are genderless. What gender would you attach to “English” if you could? The only gender left in English is those words that are intrinsically gendered: man, woman female, etc. and pronouns.
All the “Latinx” junk comes from the fight over pronouns. It came to the attention of some that when we spoke of a Latina, or Latino, we were using gendered language, and that is bad because the general term is “Latino”, the masculine form. Not only that but there suggests permanency to gender if all the nouns you use have a gender. El perro, la gata, even the word “the” carries this gendered aspect.
This is why I claim that the transgender moment can only have the power that it has in English speaking areas. Almost all other languages have gender attached to everything with a name. You can’t walk up to a perro in Chihuahua and call it a perra without its owner correcting you. But in San Diego, a dog is a dog. We have to impose gender on objects in English, so it seems an imposition to have gender at all.
The one vestige of gendered English remaining is the pronouns. Therefore, they are under attack by those that want to assume gender is an imposition. When I call someone a “he”, I gender him, in their language. In all the Romance languages, I don’t gender anyone, their gender is there, and I use it. “El” and ‘ella” don’t have the same creative power. In those languages, you are recognizing what is there with the correct form.
So here is the perversity of “Latinx”. The anti-colonialist studies groups in our higher echelons, the same ones that claim for themselves the mantle of cosmopolitanism, the cultured lovers of other cultures feel icky when they are forced to use gendered language. Their first (oftentimes only) language dispenses with gender almost completely. In their writings, they dispense with it in totality, using “they” in the (shudder) singular. But their allies in intersectionality, the poor immigrants, can’t do that. So what do these cultured wonder people do? They forced through a linguistic change on their allies. They force them to de-gender their gendered language. “We will call you Latinx instead of those icky gendered names, so uncivilized and barbaric!”
The upshot of this movement is that we have a bunch white, English speakers going to another culture, finding a part of their culture they find barbaric and forcing a change from above in all academic writing. If that isn’t the very definition of colonialism, I don’t know what is.
Published in General
Arma virumque cano . . .
And what a song it was
It’s silly. But outside of academia and the New York Times I doubt it will catch on.
I have to deal with academics, so I have plenty of time to be annoyed :)
My deepest sympathies.
Pray for me
They’re working on it. Check out this document on guidelines for the use of gender-neutral language in the European Parliament.
Slowly and surely, colonialism works it’s way.
Well what irritates me about the abuse of English pronouns is that you don’t call someone “he” or “she” to his or her face, typically. You address them by their proper name or by genderless “you.” So, not only is the trans movement corrupting the language, it’s doing it in the third person when the person being discussed isn’t even in the room!! If that’s not totalitarianism, I don’t know what is.
I just noticed the design of the front page of that document. It looks like humanoids come in two basic shapes, one wearing skirts and another wearing pants. Isn’t that awfully binary? It’s as though there are only two genders. Not only is it a false dichotomy, but the color coding is sexist, with greens and blues for the ones without skirts, and orange to pink for the ones with skirts.
How can the EU stand behind something like that?
And we’re not singing about arms and ??
things that do stuff
It’s worse than colonialism, it’s verbal sterilization; hate speech. These white, liberal elites have unilaterally decided that cultures using gendered nouns are subhuman, therefore, people of such cultures must be linguistically castrated. Eugenics – a program so beloved by the original progressives – is back with a vengeance. </sarcasm off>
Gee, this identity politics stuff is fun. With a little imagination, any sentence uttered by anyone (cough, Democratic presidential candidates) could be shown to be hate speech. What’s not to like?
The irony of your comment is that those are the words they would use for what happens when someplace is colonized. To them it is the fount of most evil, all the way up to your hyperbole, but they say it without hyperbole. That is why I find it so amusing and sickening that, with all their knowledge of what colonization is and where they think it leads, they still do it. They can’t help themselves.
Do Latino people who aren’t surrounded by white SJWs believe in any of this LatinX nonsense?
Not in my experience. Even those that are tend to roll their eyes at it
It is my observation that feminism is a white girl thing. I was in China for a few years. The ladies there hate being mistreated but not in a feminist way.
Make YouTube videos with propsals of these morons and hysterical laughter. They should be mocked and ridiculed relentlessly.
Do trans women have vaginos?
But, in a nice way.
You mean they don’t mind if you open the door for them?
Leftism is an addiction to power. It will always be totalitarian at heart.
Something like, “You’re an overbearing, self-righteous twit. And I mean that in the nicest way possible.”
So, SJWism is an imposition of white cultural norms on communities of color?
No. It’s an imposition of woke cultural nonsense.
And it makes men and women unhappy.
So just so I’m up to speed, is Latinx pronounced with the “x” on the end? Like the word lynx? Lat-incks? Does the Spanish language even end words with an X?
Or is it “Latin-ex?”
Or “Latin 10?”
Latin Vista?
Just an aside: I was always curious what pictogram they used on Men’s Room doors in Scotland. ;-)
Latinx sounds like some kind of non-stick coating the boys in Dow Chemical R&D cooked up in the 60s.