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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   29340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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By the by, Latinos hate the use of the x suffix. If you're looking to speak on their behalf, you'd best start with not using a meme that is essentially an implicit attack on their language.

It is an attack, an awkward one at that, but fully deserved. Grammatical gender is a dumb feature and I will fight the whole of the world West of the Urals and South of the Himalayas on that point. At least English somehow managed to have some positive changes to it during the middle period even with the Normans doing their best to make things worse.

Even some of the progressives have picked up on this, and are moving to "Latine", which has the advantage of not sounding absolutely stupid.

Hopefully it's pronounced differently than "latrine".

which has the advantage of not sounding absolutely stupid.

Unless you speak Spanish, in which case it still sounds stupid.

I mean, come on, English already has ‘Latin’ and ‘Hispanic’ as a gender neutral term. Inventing much dumber ones is, well, dumb.

Latine would be the correct gender-neutral Spanish form, if Spanish-speaking culture cared about being gender neutral. So I don't think it sounds stupid in Spanish, just like a word only a politically correct person would use. In much the same way that "African-American" is a perfectly cromulent English word, but the group it refers to mostly prefer "Black".

Spanish doesn’t have a gender neutral form that wasn’t made up 30 seconds ago, and most -e words are masculine anyways(what would be the article, anyways? Le is already taken, it’s a masculine objective form).

It still sounds less stupid than any attempt at pronouncing "Latinx" in either language.

My framing above is intended to indicated how I would expect the governor of California to behave, which would include use of the term "Latinx".

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