Remember, it’s “intellectually challenged,” not “retarded.” It’s “unhoused,” not “homeless.” It’s “person experiencing homelessness,” not “homeless person.” It’s “person of color,” not “black man.” It’s “food insecurity,” not “hunger.” It’s “person of transgender experience” not “sex-change freak.” It’s “person experiencing diabetes,” not “a diabetic.” It’s “mental health challenges,” not “insane.”
Are you irritated at being lectured to about language for a paragraph? You’re in good company with Hispanics and Latinos, then; more on that below. The euphemism treadmill is an endless cycle of substituting newer and vaguer words for old and well-known things. Or, “old wine in new bottles.” Linguist Steven Pinker first pointed out how terms go through phases, and as soon as the unpleasant meaning behind the term catches up with the word, we throw out the word and insert a new one for the same damned thing.
Most people find the ever-shifting linguistic carousel impossible to keep up with and annoying. But while it’s bad enough to risk social and professional censure for using the wrong word to describe hungry people, it’s entirely another to have the word for your own ethnicity doctored and replaced by woke liberals.
That’s what the sainted left has been trying to do for years with the word “Latino.” Woke blue hairs are convinced that men are bad, and that we in the west live in a “patriarchy.” For anyone who can believe that nonsense, it’s a short step to re-engineering the very names of ethnic groups, whether they like it or not. And they do not.
Have you heard the term “Latinx”? No one is sure how it’s pronounced (“la-tinks”? “la-teen-ex”?) because it’s not a real word. But the woke left has been trying to make it one for years. Why? Because Spanish is a gendered language, and they really-super-don’t-like that the collective noun for a group of Spanish speakers has a masculine “o” ending. It’s the same henpecking that took away “waitress” and gave us “server,” and that insists on calling women in show business “actors” instead of “actresses.”
Did any of the societal saviors think to ask actual Spanish speakers what they thought? Nope. But they’re telling us what they think through their votes, according to this paper co-written by scholars from Georgetown University and Harvard titled “The X Factor: How Group Labels Shape Politics.”
To quote from the study’s abstract:
We present an Identity-Expansion-Backlash Theory and posit politicians who use inclusive group labels may experience backlash among relevant group members predisposed against newly included or salient group members. Latinos’ relationship with “Latinx,” a gender-inclusive label, is a theoretical test case.
Using several datasets, we find: Latinos are less likely to support politicians who use “Latinx”; Latinos who oppose “Latinx” are less likely to support politicians who used or are associated with “Latinx”; Latinos in areas where “Latinx” is more salient are more likely to switch their vote toward Trump between 2016-2020.
While Republican Latinos were the most likely to be turned off by the woke language, even Democrat Latinos were less likely to support candidates who used it:
Isn’t it amazing? The researchers correctly noted that Hispanics don’t like “Latinx,” and that it seems to push them to vote Trump (Republican). But they still recommend trying to indoctrinate Latinos further to force them to accept this ugly neologism being applied to themselves.
Let’s see what X users had to say.
