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.
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I should write a technical post on the emerging post-Shuttle age of manned space flight, but I’ll leave that for Rand Simberg, James Gawron(?), John Walker, and the others who are more knowledgeable. Instead, I’m going to bring up a NASA language peeve: The tendency to misrepresent the meaning of “man” and “manned.”
Every year about this time folks in both the press and academia like to publish a list of words and phrases they want to see retired in the New Year. It’s usually a meaningless exercise since these sort of things tend to have a natural life cycle of their own anyway.
When I think back on how prophetic Bob Dole was, I want to flambé a grammar book. You may recall that in the midst of losing the 1996 presidential election, he began referring to himself in the third person, as in: “Make no mistake, Bob Dole is going to be the Republican nominee.” But at least he had the good sense to use his actual name, and didn’t demand that we refer to him with inanities like “Ze,” or “Hir,” or “they.” And when he excused himself to go the men’s room Bob Dole didn’t say, ”Bob Dole has to go to the ladies room.” Dave Carter misses Bob Dole.
