Not long ago, there was a story about white kid that applied for a scholarship for African-American students. He family was from South Africa.
5 Likes
I just dealt with a school form today which had “ethnicity: hispanic/latino [y] [n]”. It bothers me for several reasons.
Why are they only interested in my ethnicity if it happens to be one of those? So if I am Celt, or Berber, I have no ethnicity? Gee, thanks…
Another is the conflation with being hispanic, and being latin. What about if you are a French or Italian person? Then you would be latin, but not hispanic. Although the form has no way to distinguish between the two.
If groups like governments and companies are really interested in what people’s ethnicity is, then they need to leave it open for people to tell them, to write it in, rather than choose from a few arbitrary checkboxes.
1 Like
Because catagorizing people is always a good thing to do.
5 Likes
I have a Vietnamese/Australian friend who nearly got shot in Nepal for similar reasons [1]. Apparently, Vietnamese folks look Nepalese to Nepalis.
[1] During the Maoist insurgency; the army stopped his bus and ordered all the locals to get off. They thought he was a guerilla trying to hide amongst the tourists.
4 Likes
I know of someone personally who did this when applying. Imagine the conversation: “well, we meant the other kind of African-American”. I also know a classmate of my son who’s mother is African-American, but very light, and father is northern European. She looks Scandinavian with blonde hair and blue eyes, yet describes herself as African-American. I’d LOVE to hear a college official trying to question her on that!
6 Likes
“Latin” is not about the source of the language but about Latin-America, i.e. that part of North,South and Central America (with the islands) which lies south of the US border.
4 Likes
I bet some people do, but as I understand it, they are for changing the usage for modern times, and that is a political move, as politics is the art of the possible, to be able to have the word accepted goes a long way towards getting an idea accepted. Face it, as you said, if usage of a word sticks, then it gets accepted, but words are not formed by the RAE, they are only accepted and given a formal definition.
The RAE can condemn usage all it wants, in the end, it will have to adjust to what is really being used as these new words accepted this year will attest:
Feminicidio
Espanglish
Lonchera
Matrimonio homosexual
Monoparental
Multiculturalidad
and
Papichulo
source: http://www.batanga.com/curiosidades/7544/25-nuevas-palabras-aceptadas-por-la-rae
Latinx sounds odd to me, but having understood what is being communicated, taking offense at the word is strictly to take offense at the concept being communicated, otherwise, perfectly useful words like “Verga” would lose meaning if found offensive in which case, no offense need be taken at all. That is: If I called you (And I assume you speak spanish because: Context), a $spanish_slang_curse_word_NOT_accepted_by_rae, then you should take offense at me using a non-word and not at my attempt to communicate disdain.
3 Likes
Why was former evolution of the language “natural” but any modern attempt to modify it is not?
Why is “feel-good” a bad thing, when we’re talking about an oppressed class of people who the very language helps to make invisible?
7 Likes
4 Likes
On my perception natural evolution of the language occurs when things like a pineapple doesn’t have a name, does this look like a fruit, but if it lookis like ti comes from a pine, then, let’s call it the apple of a pine tree. Then, we have to invent plurals, genders, times, and so on. Then, some loanwords, and so on.
Inclusive language is just (as far) an attempt to force a convoluted way of communicating (making communication harder), for the sake of people not feeling explicitly being mentioned, and it is very hard to do so in a casual conversation, and in work environments it just loses the meaning.
Try this: “The majority of male dogs and female dogs are the best male friends and the best females friends of as many male babies and female babies, and many boys and girls, and many female teenagers and male teenagers, and many adult males and adult females, and many menopausic women and andropausic men, and also many golden age males and golden age females”
That’s a free translation of a famous example of why inclusive language doesn’t make sense and it is just an annoyance, I guess you know which phrase it really means, right? But, this time it tries to not offend many people, and also, to keep cat or other-pets lovers happy, because they were oppressed before and feel-goodness! Gods and goddesses forbid they remain male invisible, female invisible, and genderfluid invisible. 
2 Likes
Really? Wow. If you’re close enough to Ms. Lanzo that you can make such an assurance, I’m sure you’d have no problem getting her to come onto the BBS and confirm it herself.
I mean, I haven’t even considered the possibility that you don’t know her at all, because what kind of asshole would make such a confident assurance about what a perfect stranger does in private?
5 Likes
I can assure you, one thing is to be publicly politically correct, and the other is being casual and speak naturally. I suppose you think politicians keep kissing babies off camera too?
Many of them are of grandparent and great-grandparent age, so yes. Yes, I do.
2 Likes
That translation doesn’t make your case very well.
“People” is inclusive of all people regardless of age and gender, and in fact is more inclusive than the convoluted example which you provided. Just as “Latinx” is simpler and more inclusive than “Latino y Latina” or “Latino men and Latina women”.
4 Likes
Well, yes, in English just “people” makes sense, just as the loanword from romance languages “latino” already is as inclusive and has always been.
That’s the whole point, why create and popularize a word that isn’t necessary at all when everybody already gets that latinos means “those people” (myself included at the genetic and geopolitical level).
i just don’t get it… Is something of the new generations to be that demanding and thin skinned? A thing of those who get a medal just for participating?
1 Like
I disagree that it necessarily has to do with inclusiveness of identities, but that seems to be how many/most understand it. Being a prickly sort I see it as a matter of accuracy. If people insist upon calling me something because they lack a word for what I am, then we make a word for it to solve the problem. I don’t need to “feel-good” about it, although I might, and it serves to alleviate confusion.
For example, if people wonder why a Chinese person such as myself is so unlike other Chinese, and why am so clueless about Chinese culture - then the fact that I am not Chinese would explain rather a lot. So in the interests of clarity, I should be called something else. It does not mean that I need some special validation from society to be myself. There are some who default to and even insist upon polarizing all people as either black or white, man or woman, because it is easy, as in simplistic.
Something as simple as adding an Mx. to forms along with Mr. and Ms. seems like a simple thing to many, but a torturous mindfuck to others who prop up lots of contrived reasons as to why they feel they shouldn’t need to.
If your example above is illustrating that language is often complicated by instances of being unnecessarily gendered, then I agree. It’s one of the reasons I find the Spanish language confusing! I hardly even buy the concept of people having a gender, but then I need to guess genders for cars and bookshelves as well? But OTOH it makes perfect sense that we have words to refer to male and female because those are real concepts we encounter in daily life. As well as intersex, agender, and other non-binaries. I think a case can be easily made that habitual linguistic forms have over the years marginalized those groups, both intentionally and unintentionally. So having a more robust vocabulary allows us to discuss such things and acknowledge that the concepts behind these words and labels - the people - exist as well. Partly because it is socially responsible and they might feel good about it, but also simply because it is the truth.
1 Like
Yup, I understand that completely, as of the moment, the RAE doesn’t agree on using ‘e’, ‘@’ or ‘x’ to define gender neutral words, but that might change in a hundred years.
And ‘latinx’ at the end is something created in English, I just jumped out because on my area there was a huge effort of being politically correct by using inclusive language extensively, and after doing considerable damage, it was backtracked by the local education office as an occurrence that was speedtracked into the curricula because that’s how politics works at the moment, because by seeming to be open minded you get votes. For that reason Oxford might pick up latinx soon enough I guess.
However, as I stated above, the kids in school would answer like that to get the points, but such way of speaking will not gain track on the real world, because of the RAE already states, there is something called “economy of the language”, that is, try to get the idea as simple and efficient as possible across.
And I hope we don’t need to get into cursing around this? You $expletive_in_spanish! 
3 Likes
This is because “gender” is a traditional word to describe something that kind of has nothing (directly) to do with gender. It’s about noun classification. Some languages have genders of animate and inanimate, for instance. In Spanish, it’s not that tables or keys are feminine, but rather that the word ends a certain way. That’s how genders work in a lot of Indo-European languages. Since “man” and “woman” in these languages tend to end differently, they historically became the sort of primary archetype to which other nouns are compared and classified. But due to cultural concerns about gender and the nature of word borrowing, there tend be exceptions to these classification rules because languages are inherently messy. In Arabic, for instance, really old words tend to be exceptions to gender rules because they likely carried their gender from the languages they originally came from.
So we call the concept gender, but its direct relationship to gender as used in other contexts is actually fairly idiosyncratic. English speakers tend to see gender as an obsolete idea, much like case, but this is because they don’t know what they’re missing. Case and gender can actually make certain things less ambiguous. There are trade-offs to having or not having these features in a language. Language is an evolved structure, not an engineered one.
5 Likes
Stop trying to make Latinx a thing, it’s not going to happen. I’m willing to bet 99% of Latinos have no (or negative) opinions about non-binary gender inclusivity. Also, plural masculine forms in Spanish have always been gender inclusive, so really gilding the lily with Latinx.
4 Likes
I mainly hear that coming from hispanics/latinos themselves. It might be mainly olds now though, it’s been a while.
1 Like
