“Though Latinx is becoming common in social media and in academic writing,” a recent Merriam-Webster “words we’re watching” entry noted, “it is unclear whether it will catch on in mainstream use.” And last week a progressive pollster ran the numbers and found that it hasn’t caught on at all: “Despite its usage by academics and cultural influencers, 98 percent of Latinos prefer other terms to describe their ethnicity. Only 2 percent of our respondents said the label accurately describes them, making it the least popular ethnic label among Latinos.”
Beyond its novelty, there are obvious reasons for that stark unpopularity: When spoken, “Latinx” sounds like neither normal English nor conversational Spanish, and it looks like what it is, a word designed for ideological purposes rather than for felicity in speech. If you are deep inside progressive discourse, you will immediately understand those purposes — “dismantling the default masculine” of romance languages, centering gender neutrality or nonbinariness in place of a cisgender heteronormativity. If you are outside that discourse, politicians who use it will sound like they don’t know how to say “Latino,” or like they’re talking to an audience that doesn’t really include you.
The Left has immense desire of apply Zero Year to everything they touch. Nothing from the past seems to be good enough and needs to be erased/transformed/rebuilt. And they are truly surprised when its intended target does not prostrate immediate at their White Feet, thanking them and pledging eternal allegiance at their obvious superiority.
“Despite its usage by academics and cultural influencers, 98 percent of Latinos prefer other terms to describe their ethnicity.
You Libs have an issue: The “Influencers” are not so much and there is one academy in charge of the Spanish Language already: La Real Academia de le Lengua Española. (Royal Spanish Academy) some 300 years old and very much appreciated from anybody who went to school and learned the language.
In a world where Hispanics suffer fast unexpected changes and not all of them good, Spanish is the one constant we have that unites us all. Spanish, no matter where in the world, will have the same almost immutable grammar and spelling that allow us for easier communication and faster settlement. It is a warm safe spot in a confusing world. One of those immutable things is “genero” or genre which does not come from some political orientation but by simple observation of the reality of life: There are males and females in almost every aspect of observable Nature and our language reflects that.
But the Spanish language has this little interesting quirk: Neutro (Neutral). Neutro are words in the language that are to be used in general terms to encompass both sexes. Some are specific and some to be taken as neutral depending how they are used. Example: The pronoun “Nosotros” (We) has its female counterpart with “Nosotras” when the groups of people are either male or female. But when we have a group of mixed sex, then “Nosotros” becomes a neutral term and nobody gets their intellectual “calzones” in a bunch becuase it should have been Nosotrix or some stupid shit like that.
So there are Hipanos (males) and Hispanas (females) and when we are all conglomerated in one group, the several hundred years of true scholarly academy work has accepted that Hispanos is more than enough and well settled to understand when boys and girls from our culture across the world get together and need to be identified.
“Latinx” sounds like neither normal English nor conversational Spanish, and it looks like what it is, a word designed for ideological purposes rather than for felicity in speech.
It does not “look like,” it is an ideological tool that has achieved zero resonance among the Latino/Hispanic community. And the “felicity in speech” threw me for a loop. Are the creators and user of Latinex implying we are not happy with the Spanish language? Other than being an elementary school kid having to learn all the Reglas Gramaticales (Grammar rules) the rest of the Spanish-Speaking world seems to be rather happy about the language.
If you are outside that discourse, politicians who use it will sound like they don’t know how to say “Latino,” or like they’re talking to an audience that doesn’t really include you.
We cherish the constancy of our language. In a universe of so divergent people as Latinos, it is the unifying center of our world and not just our politics. The book Don Quijote de la Mancha was written in the XV Century and the above mentioned elementary school kid can actually read and understand over 95% of it because the Spanish language is not subjected to a popularity contest every year to see what new words will be added because of “fun” or other irrelevant crap. I still remember the uproar that caused the acceptance by the academy of the works “whisky” (whiskey) in the dictionary and how some academics said it marked the beginning of the end of the language.
So when we have some Liberal politician who has not been raised in Spanish but is but a secondary thought in his/her race for elective position, trying to tell me I have to be defined by a made-up political term, we do tend to ignore it and even the less sophisticated among us (me included) will reply with a rather less than refined comment: “Anda que te den por el culo.”
Fun fact: “Whisky” is used exclusively when referring to Scottish versions of the distillation, i.e., Scotch. All other distillations use “whiskey” as the descriptor. You will never see a Bourbon or a Tennessee or any other distillation use the word without the “e”.
So … The Scots are thrifty right down to the vowels.
(Said by one with a touch of Celt in his own lineage.)
The Scots have to be thrifty with vowels, cause the Welsh use so many they had to turn ‘y’ and ‘w’ into vowels.
Japanese Whisky being an exception- but it’s just Scotch distilled in Japan.
Dang good stuff, too.
While Progressives are colonizers. They will invade your language and kill your mother tongue to promote their values.
Great close. I also want to add, and no offense to you Miguel as this is just reality. I find this latinx term insulting as these asshole progressives insist on lumping all people of latin descent into one group to control us. I’m Cuban, you are Venezuelan, although we both speak Spanish your history and my history are totally different as we are also different culturally. As an example, Venezuelans have if I remember right 11 different ways to order coffee. We Cubans only have three, caffecito, sin azucar y cortadito. Cafe con leche is another animal. You have your own idioms in your language of Spanish that makes me scratch my head and go “WTF did he just say?” As far as I am concerned, this term can go the way of the dodo bird.
Like
Cuban Spanish has their own idioms and slang, as does Venezuelan Spanish, Guatemalan, Mexican, Catalan, and so forth. But any literate ten year old in any of those nations can pick up an unabridged copy of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha and read it with complete fluency.
Modern American students have trouble reading Mark Twain, let alone John Milton.
Preach 😃👍🏼
Words matter…to folks with values.
Attempts to maim or disable or destroy our language are just that.
THEY want you on your heels then on your knees.
If you want security and safety so much that you’re willing to give up your liberty, then don’t come crying to me.
Adding cisgendered SHIT to my daily beat just ain’t gonna happen.
It’s a binary world. Innie or outie. Decent human or POS. Not my problem. Pick one and stick with it.
It gets worse, in the interest of performative “wokeness” the dreaded x has been stuffed into gender neutral English words spawning such abominations as folkx and yx’all.
I suppose one response to latinx is to ask if the person is speaking Flemish since that language has lots of,words ending in x.
Now, I won’t pretend to be an expert in the Spanish language (“¿De donde el bano, por favor?” is about the extent of my Español.) but one thing I’ve noticed about “Latinx” is that no one I’ve ever asked about it has been able to explain to me how to pronounce it in accordance with Spanish pronunciation rules.
The letter “x” is one of the least used in Spanish (“w” is the least used) with the vast majority of words containing an “x” being loan-words from Central and South American indigenous languages. Because the way Spanish pronunciation treats the “x” sound best matches the sounds used in those languages.
English retains a lot of words that end in “x,” almost all originating from Greek: appendix, codex, index, and so forth. But that’s because English pronunciation means an ending “x” is pronounced like an “ecks” sound. In Spanish, it’s more of an “ehh” or “haytch” sound… So these Greek originated words have become appendíce, códice, índice, and so forth. Compare the way English pluralizes them: appendices, codices, indices, and so forth.
Why, it’s almost like the Spanish language was developed by a bunch of people who weren’t speaking English! ¡Qué sorpresa!
I’m not a native English speaker; I learned the language in school where formal grammar was one of the tools. And I learned some other languages that have “grammatical gender”, including French (which also has two) and German and Latin (which have three, the third being “neuter”). My native language is Dutch, which at one time had three genders like German, but the masculine and feminine have essentially blended together, the differences that used to show up in word forms no longer appear. The distinction with neuter is very much alive, however.
In all these, it is a general rule that grammatical “gender” is just a peculiarity of the grammar rules for a given word, and rarely has any rational connection to any reality. In particular, to think of it as related to sex can lead you astray. Yes, it may be true that human and animal gender carries over into grammatical gender. Or maybe not; in Dutch and German, diminutive forms are always neuter. (“boy” is masculine, but “little boy” is neuter.)
I also learned a rule common to many languages, that the masculine form is also the gender-neutral form. As you mentioned, “nosotros” doesn’t just mean “we males” but also “we persons of unstated or mixed gender”.
The nonsense that is “latinx” is the result of a toxic blend of ignorance and far left ideology. The latter is obvious; the former comes from knowing only English — a language with no significant grammatical gender — combined with an utter lack of understanding of (or interest in) grammar and etymology. It’s hard to imagine a native spearer of Spanish, French, or German coming up with this nonsense, even if he were a fanatical socialist.
Re Don Quijote: perhaps the poor education is a factor. There may be others. I can read 200 year old English novels (I’m working on Tom Jones right now, very good). But it can be a struggle; the vocabulary has changed quite a lot, as has the way of constructing sentences and at times the spelling. Go back a couple more centuries and it gets quite hard — Chaucer is close to a foreign language. But the same is true in my native language; I’ve spent some time on the Dutch Declaration of Independence (1581). It’s quite hard to read.
The nonsense that is “latinx” is the result of a toxic blend of ignorance and far left ideology. The latter is obvious; the former comes from knowing only English — a language with no significant grammatical gender….
And English is the language of all those evil Western European slave-owners who led America to freedom, wrote our Constitution, and endowed our liberties in the Bill of Rights, but who we’re also supposed to “unperson” and forget ever existed because nothing they ever did is worth remembering, let alone honoring.
So why in this case is it acceptable to listen to those old dead white guys and follow their linguistic lead?
Are the creators and user of Latinex [sic] implying we are not happy with the Spanish language?
Not at all!
They’re implying that right-thinking people CANNOT be happy with such an archaic, out-dated, male-centric, misogynistic language. To them, the Royal Spanish Academy — and its 300 years of linguistic authority — mean less than nothing, since it’s content to perpetuate the gendered injustice.
To them, the male form cannot be used neutrally to refer to mixed groups; the fact that there IS a male form is an attack on females, trans, non-binary, etc. (But the reverse can never be true, even if the Academy were to change the rules so the female form became the default reference for mixed groups.)
They say it’s about removing gendered language and making it all gender-neutral to promote equality, but it’s not; it’s about de-legitimizing and removing the male half. Just like their idea of “social justice” isn’t about justice at all, social or otherwise; it’s about silencing and punishing dissenting thought, and doing so under cover of legal authority.
It’s Orwell’s Newspeak all over again; the true purpose is to remove inconvenient words and make wrongthink effectively impossible.
All of this is intended to divide and “hyphenate” us. I won’t have any part of it. How do I respond when asked about my ethnicity? ” Cuban by birth and American by the grace of God.” That’s all anybody needs to know…
Every shred of evidence gathered by genetic, paleontological, anthropological, geological, et. al. sciences points to H. sapiens first emerging as a distinct species roughly 300,000 years ago in the region now named the Albertine Rift valley between modern-day Tanzania and the Congo.
We are all of African ancestry. It’s just some of us have ancestors who left more recently than others.
Until one of these social justice nincompoops can show me a credible, peer-reviewed empirical, objective, and falsifiable paper that contradicts and overturns centuries of science I see no reason to identify as anything else.
This “Latinx” thing is just a symbol for the larger assault on the traditional language. It would be bad enough if all they wanted to do was to change “Latino/Latina” into “Latinx”, but that’s not all they want. They want to completely tear down and rebuilt all gendered languages into new, gender neutral languages. So that 300 years of the Royal College? Fuck it. The even longer centuries that Spanish evolved as a gendered language from Latin, also a gendered language? To hell with it. They know better, it’s a revolution, and if they need to rebuild your entire language and history, they will. They are already doing it to “white” Western history, but in a way this is even worse. This is something that touches every Spanish speaking person directly, is a major part of their identity. The language represents an unbroken oral tradition passed on from person to person over a thousand years. It was the language spoken by your ancestors. But the left is here to fix it and make it better, by “fundementally transforming” it. Their Newspeak attempts in the English language have been minor and petty so far, in comparison. WE won’t have to change our ENTIRE language, because ‘it’s not gendered to start with. We just have to add trendy new words and make sure to add the prescribed “Correct” sentiments at periods. If I was Spanish speaking, I would be furious with this attempt to meddle with my culture and traditions. Furious. It makes me angry as it is, and I don’t even speak it.