The Merriam-Webster Dictionary managed a woke trifecta this month, simultaneously denying sexual difference, degrading the English language, and infecting a foreign culture with Anglophonic leftism. Webster has replaced the Spanish-derived words “Latino” and “Latina,” which describe people of Latin American descent, with the “more inclusive” alternative “Latinx.” This solution in search of a problem confronts a facet of romance languages missing in our own — namely, gendered nouns. The difference between male and female inheres in the Spanish language, which lacks a neuter noun form. But the modern Left denies the reality of gender altogether, and so it has invented a new word that “purposefully breaks with Spanish’s gendered grammatical tradition.”
“Latinx,” clunky as it is, at least improves on the Left’s previous effort to castrate Spanish with the term “Latin@,” wherein the final letter was replaced by a symbol used almost exclusively in email addresses. Linguistic colonizers abandoned that early effort, not because it was unpronounceable, but because it excluded “those outside the gender binary,” whomever those mythical creatures may be. (As for hermaphrodites, “Latin@” seems to offer the ideal linguistic bastardization by combining both genders in one seamless symbol.)
Unbeknownst to Merriam-Webster, the English language already offers a gender-neutral form of “Latino/a/x/@/£/etc.” The word is “Latin,” as in, “Pedro is Latin American.” English speakers dine at Italian, not “Italiano,” restaurants. We drink French, not “Français,” wine. Americans on the Left and Right alike anglicize foreign words because we speak English. The Left, however, resists anglicizing Spanish terms because its political agenda relies on encouraging illegal immigration from Latin America and discouraging the assimilation of Hispanics into American society. Regardless, the ideologues now anglicize with a vengeance — Spanish words don’t end in “x” — as they shoe-horn modern American gender ideology into the Spanish language.
Unfortunately for woke white liberals, their ugly jargon hasn’t attracted much use. Webster admits, “Though Latinx is becoming common in social media and in academic writing, it is unclear whether it will catch on in mainstream use.” Neither credibly prescriptive nor descriptive, “Latinx” is not a real word. The Left has long relied on silly jargon to defend ideological fantasy, masking inhuman ideas in “politically correct” language. Americans seem to have caught on to the lies, and two years ago they elected a “politically incorrect” president, who uses harsh language to describe illegal aliens but at least has never called them “Latinx.”