Cancelled

Erik Twice wrote: I'm just tired of not being able to talk without some random American pidgeonholing me into their political system and views. I think you could have had enough respect to not say I'm using "Republican tactics" and say I view other people as having "subversive agendas" because I think their criticisms are vague.

Sure. And I probably would have until you declared yourself the arbiter of "what's really happening". which I found kind of surprising coming from someone whose insights I normally respect. This can be quite the emotional issue, as Calvin's sometimes OTT response indicated. But when you start assigning motives to other people without evidence, there's going to be a reaction.

And I'm not arguing with you. I'm not suggesting (or, at least I'm trying not to) that you or Shellhead or FCM are "wrong" or are racists/colonialists/imperialists/culturally oblivious Americans or anything of the sort. Initially, I was attempting to clarify the concern that Calvin and others had about the art. You're the one who started assigning ulterior motives to it.

I'm not sure how much this contributes to the conversation but polling suggests that most Hispanics don't really know the term Latinx and of those that do, most don't really use it: www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/...x-but-just-3-use-it/

Time for closing arguments.

sornars wrote: I'm not sure how much this contributes to the conversation but polling suggests that most Hispanics don't really know the term Latinx and of those that do, most don't really use it: www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/...x-but-just-3-use-it/

A good poll.

Half of my family is Hispanic.
They don’t use it.

But, as I wrote above, I’ve never heard it used (outside of work) by anyone but Latinx people.

Both can be true.

Jackwraith wrote: Sure. And I probably would have until you declared yourself the arbiter of "what's really happening". which I found kind of surprising coming from someone whose insights I normally respect. This can be quite the emotional issue, as Calvin's sometimes OTT response indicated. But when you start assigning motives to other people without evidence, there's going to be a reaction.

I did not declare myself arbiter of anything nor assigned motive to anyone. I simply think that the debate focuses too much on semantics and too little on the reality of the games, or the art or whatever it is than we are actually discussing. I don't know where your nonsene about Republicans and "subversive agents" comes from.

I really don't know what's your problem dude. Get a grip.

I'm tired but I do want to comment on the "Lantix" thing.

As you might know, Spanish has two grammatical genders. All words are either male and female and must match with the rest of the phrase lilke you would with singulars and plural. For example, "She is a very beautiful girl" would include a female "beautiful" (bonita) as well as a female "boy/girl" (chica) to go along the "She". This means Spanish is more dense, more information can be conveyed in fewer words. In that phrase we can remove the subject entirely (Es una chica muy bonita) and still know what we are talking about.

Gender is purely grammatical and has no relation to the meaning of the word. For example, feminism is male but masculinity is female. There's no reason why potatoes are female and robots male. It's arbitrary.

Now, since Spanish has no neutral gender the masculine takes that role. You use the plural masculine to adress a class with both male and female students. The alternative used by some politicians is to repeat everything twice. As you can imagine "I want to say hello to male all and female all male students and female students" gets grating very quickly. Again, since gender is just grammatical there's no deeper meaning to it.

Some feminists do not see it this way and consider it a sexist feature of language. Some groups propose replacing gendered words with either repetitive phrasing, @ signs (as in "chic@") or using x as an "unknown variable" akin to the ones in an equation. "Latinx" is an example of that.

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With that out of the way, here are the issues with "Latinx"

1) Latinx is literally unpronounceable in Spanish. There are very few words with an x in Spanish and none that end with it. And it's not pronounced "eks" but "equis". Hence "Latinequis".

2) The word is still gendered! Removing the termination changes nothing. Latinx is male if used as a noun and female if used as an adjective.

3) The term is only used in writing.

4) Latinx has heavily political connotations like, say, "herstory", "comrade" or "queendom". It's a word only those of a very particular political inclination would use. Its use has a clear political goal which most speakers don't agree with.

5) It's simply not used by the vast majority of the people it refers to. Even in the United States, practically no one uses it to refer to themselves. It's actively hated, even. People feel it's being forced into them by people who don't even speak Spanish or come from Latinamerica.

n815e wrote: And yet, the only people I know of that use Latinx are Latinx people.

It is increasingly used by corporations and other instituations. For example, most videogame platforms including Playstation, Xbox and Steam used the word in recent marketing campaigns. It's being pushed as the de facto word to use by the anglosphere.

I'm not disagreeing or arguing with anything previously said because I just don't know enough about this topic and will defer, but I had not heard of that term until I noticed board game personality Brittanie Boe (BeBo) using Latinx in her profile. I noticed a couple of other followers/friends of hers using it as well.

I've never heard anyone use it anywhere else though in my personal life.

Good points about the use of latinx, Erik. I just want to comment on one thing. When you write "... since Spanish has no neutral gender the masculine takes that role." and later "Again, since gender is just grammatical there's no deeper meaning to it."

You sort of acknowledge that there can in fact be a deeper meaning, and honestly I think it's pretty obvious. Because, while most words have a sort of random gender, the ones that refer specifically to men and women, boys and girls do not. So by grammatically adressing the men/boys in the room you are in fact excluding the women/girls. I fully understand how this is tradition, but saying there is no deeper meaning is false. It's just like how man means both a male person and human in English, or how we in Danish use mand as a suffix (man - as in male person) in for instance formand (chairman). And it's also related to how in Danish (and English, I guess) the base of a word like skuespiller (actor) is non-gendered and refers to all of that profession and then you can also be a skuespillerinde (actress). So effectively the masculine version of the word can be used to refer to both genders while the feminine can't.

This is not an argument for using latinx. But it's just to say that even these kind of seemingly random things in our language *do* matter because they effectively remind women that they are not the norm, whereas men are.

I think that cancellation makes people feel more powerful, but I question whether it even works in the United States. Our society is extremely polarized right now, so cancellation by one side is still only going to be cancellation by roughly half our people.

mads b. wrote: So by grammatically adressing the men/boys in the room you are in fact excluding the women/girls.

This is simply not true. You are not "grammatically adressing the men". You are using the appropiate neutral form which includes everyone. It's just that that form is grammatically masculine.

If I say "There are cats in my neighbourhood" in Spanish I'm not excluding female cats. If I say "there's a bunch of people in the street", I don't only mean women, even if the grammatical gender of the sentence is female. Remember, all words have a grammatical gender. One does not exclude women by using the neutral masculine anymore than you feminize calculators. That's too literal-minded.

In that sense it's like colours. You might have heard that Japanese didn't have a separate word for green until very recently. That doesn't mean they were blind and couldn't tell blue apart from green. Or that it's a value judgement on either.

Keep in mind this is a quick explanation. There's actually a neutral gender in Spanish, found in just one word (Lo). Not all words are male or female, many are ambivalent (Epicenos). And it's not so much that masculine is used as neutral as much as Spanish lacks the separate male gender other languages have. But that's beyond the scope of my post.

Erik Twice wrote:

mads b. wrote: So by grammatically adressing the men/boys in the room you are in fact excluding the women/girls.

This is simply not true. You are not "grammatically adressing the men". You are using the appropiate neutral form which includes everyone. It's just that that form is grammatically masculine.
.

Honest question: how is that any different from using the presumptive male gender in English?

Frohike wrote: Honest question: how is that any different from using the presumptive male gender in English?

I don't know what "Presumptive gender" is, sorry. Googling didn't produce any results.

Using the male gender as a "default" or "neutral" to indicate a human who could be any... other gender. For instance, referring to a hypothetical player as "he," rather than a pronoun that doesn't specifically map to the male gender. Or, to take it a bit further, the tendency of using words like "mankind" to signify humankind.

It sounded like you were making a case for this being somehow uniquely... ok/benign in Latin-derived languages? My personal take is that this type of argument has an aggressively retrograde vintage of roughly 15-20 years ago when feathers were being ruffled in academia about PC culture and the older guard/generation was having a difficult time letting go of some concepts, such as using male pronouns as a default.

Just because man-male-human is a historically naturalized "appropriate" pairing in a non-anglo language doesn't remove a clearly political dynamic in making the female gender the more "specific" instance of a human, regardless of whether or not it's framed outside of ostensibly "overpolarized" American politics. I'm a French speaker and I think Luce Irigaray was onto something with her analysis of phallocentrism and its relationship to language.

Some Argentinian teens seem to have picked up on a version of this too:

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/12/...er-neutral-language/

I just think we should probably be a little less eager to foist this particular shift on "American neo-liberal imperialist politics" or whatever and maybe admit that this is part of a larger movement.

Frohike wrote: Using the male gender as a "default" or "neutral" to indicate a human who could be any... other gender.

If you speak French, it's pretty much the same as in that language. Using the neutral male doesn't mean women are excluded, it only means the grammatical gender of the phrase is male. So our Germanic friends understand, this is a normal exchange in Spanish:

- Do you have any brothers?
- Yes, I have one little sister

The question is plural and male as far as grammar is concerned, but the meaning is not. Women (or little sisters in this case) are included.

My personal take is that this type of argument has an aggressively retrograde vintage of roughly 15-20 years ago when feathers were being ruffled in academia about PC culture and the older guard/generation was having a difficult time letting go of some concepts, such as using male pronouns as a default.

Sure, but being old-fashioned doesn't make it wrong. It's a sound argument and internally consistent with the way the language works. It takes into account both how people speak and the ethimological evolution of words. Here in Spain, the Royal Academy has published some fantastic suggestions for a less sexist use of language without turning it upside down.

Personally, I think the "feminist perspective" in the subject is no less old-fashioned. It comes from the second wave of feminism in the sixties with all the sex essentialism that entails. I think this side to the argument, ironically, makes gender more important and oppressive. You mention Irigaray who was very much guilty of this.

I just think we should probably be a little less eager to foist this particular shift on "American neo-liberal imperialist politics" or whatever and maybe admit that this is part of a larger movement.

It's true. I sometimes see latinos say this is just an American invention being pushed on them and that's just not true. There's a marked influence from the anglosphere, but the same was true of the French intellectual elite a few years ago. It's just something to keep in mind.

The difference between cats and people is that while you don't grammatically differentiate between female and male cats, you do that with people. So if you have a room full of female cats, you would still call them gatos and use the grammattical gender associated with cats (male). But if you have a room full of women, you would adress them with the plural associated with women which also happens to be grammatically female. You'd adress a room full of men in another way, but for a mixed room you do not use a third neutral article, you use the male article which is considered neutral.

Another example is if you talk about a group of chairpersons. Just a few years ago the normal was to say chairmen even if the group actually consisted of both chairmen and chairwomen. So yes, by using a word that is grammatically or ethymologically associated with men as the so-called neutral for adressing mixed groups is in fact excluding women. And you can see this very easily in the fact that while you can use the word chairmen for a mixed group, you would never do the same with chairwomen.

Now, by talking about "exclusion" I'm not meaning to say that the women are excluded from the group or that they are oppressed by the language. I simply mean that looking at it from a language perspective they might as well not be there. This does not happen to men because the male version of a word is the default in many languages. Again, this does not in itself create oppression, but I think it's fairly non-controversial to say that the fact that male is the default gender in our languages (not just in grammar, but also in words such as chairman or actor/actress) is obviously because men have historically been seen as the default gender and have also been the gender with rights.

Will changing our language in itself equality between men and women? No, but of course it will make a difference. Now, I am aware that this is most likely different from language to language. And in Spanish that uses grammatically female and male genders maybe it feels different from Danish where we have non-gendered or common-gendered words which means that while we have male versions of words used at the norm (skuespiller/skuespillerinde, formand/forkvinde etc) we don't have a grammatical difference.