Our son Luke is a professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of Montreal. Since I didn’t know what a linguistic anthropologist was before I had one in the family, there is a chance that you don’t know either; so I shall explain briefly. There are four broad subjects covered by most academic anthropology departments: archaeology, bioanthropology, linguistic anthropology, and social-cultural anthropology. The last—Coming of Age in Samoa, and so forth--is what I used to think of as anthropology, period. But significant speech is such an important characteristic of the human species that it, and the myriad human languages that govern it, provide large opportunities for study on their own. Just at the moment Luke is encouraging me to devote an essay to the linguistic fallout of the French Revolution, when (in theory) all the old titles of address were scrapped for the single democratic citoyen(ne). Part of his own very interesting research involves various kinds of large-scale linguistic indirection in such phenomena as personal honorifics, euphemisms, and markedly differing parallel registers of vocabulary based in familial and other social structures. I think I will probably try something along those lines in the next few weeks, but I shall first require some actual library time to do so, and I am unlikely to be able to achieve that in the immediate future. We have touched upon this topic obliquely before. Luke and I are both chess players, and were once frequent adversaries—until he simply outdistanced me so conspicuously in skill as to make the exercise a little tedious. But during that period I did read about the revolutionary effect on this hallowed game in which the two most important pieces were a king and a queen, and the three other major pieces (castle, knight, and bishop) all reflect a hierarchical, feudal organization of church and state. When you abolished monarchy, you got chessmen in which the “king” was Jean-Jacques Rousseau!
But a recent news item encourages me to deal with a particular instance of political linguistic interference that has stuck in my craw; and that is the barbarism LatinX. I do not object to the invention of new words, but I do object to the invention of words that cannot be pronounced. Conceivably one could say latinks, though I don’t why you would. What people do say is trisyllabic: Latin-Ex, which if it meant anything at all would mean something very different from what I believe is intended. The news item reported that hostility to “LatinX” was providing a rare instance of political bipartisan agreement. Right-wingers objected to the overt political correctness of the neologism. A group of left-leaning Democrats of Hispanic origin, on the other hand, objected to it for its attempt to pervert an essential characteristic of the Spanish language: namely, that like all the Romance languages, it is gendered.
In what follows I limit myself entirely to linguistic analysis, eschewing all personal political opinion. In contemporary American Spanish the word for a male of Hispanic descent is sometimes latino, that for a female latina. The same adjective, in both of its forms, can of course be meaningfully applied to many nouns. The capitalization of the word is arbitrary or conventional, and I am indifferent to it. The uncapitalized form seems to me more efficient. When I first started studying the German language, all its nouns were capitalized. Linguistic authorities successfully transitioned away from that quickly and without much squawking. The invented term LatinX has as its aim “gender equity,” in which the distinction male/female is extinguished. That is, the X could be either-o or -a. My first and stolid objection to LatinX is the redundancy. It serves no purpose not already served by the adjective Latin: Latin rhythm, Latin lover, Latin piquancy, etc., without necessary suggestion of sexual differentiation. If Anglo-Saxons exist, Latins must perforce exist.
It is a characteristic of all the world’s major languages to strive for clarity and specificity, though some are much better at achieving it than others. The ancient Stoic linguists advanced the argument that all words are irremediably ambiguous, and that trying to explicate them by the use of other words—the only means at our disposal—is “like bringing an unlighted candle into a darkened room.” A fatal weakness for ambiguity was attached particularly to words written down as opposed to those spoken. This is why Æneas begs the Cumaean Sibyl to deliver the news in oral rather than in written form. As slightly modified by certain recent French literary theorists, the posterity of this nifty doctrine has been ravaging literary study for a few decades now. Endemically ambiguous language can lead only to “indeterminacy”, a favorite term among Deconstructionists, whether it be used to describe artistic intention or simply the pitiful results of the debility of the human tongue. It is not that there is nothing in the idea: there is, a little. A good deal of artistic prose, and practically all poetry, exploits linguistic ambiguity on principle. But as a general characteristic of language it is absurd, as Augustine insisted nearly two thousand years ago. The general aims of ordinary speech and of formal communication are clarity and exactitude. You are not hoping to applaud cunning ambiguity in the instructions on your medicine bottle or in the deed to your domicile.
American English is adaptable and welcoming to sensible neologisms. When in fairly recent times the long-honored distinction between Miss (an unmarried woman) and Mrs (a married woman, though sometimes a widow) was perceived by many to be a problem, a comprehensive generic substitute (Ms) was very widely adopted without much fuss. It would be apparent to any student of social history that in the contemporary setting there are potentially significant invidious possibilities in the old distinction. There was no such distinction for males, though the mystery word bachelor, which appeared fairly early (Chaucer’s Squire is a lusty bachelor, an energetic youth), crept in around the edges. In early English there were many nouns which de facto existed in two forms, one masculine, the other feminine. The male who produced bread was a baker. A woman who did the same thing was a baxter. Several such distinctions now exist only in surnames: Weaver and Webster, for instance. One distinction that has recently proved troublesome is actor/actress. The distinction has been judged oppressive and politically incorrect. On other fronts the insertion of “gender identity” may seem gratuitous. “Amelia Schackenfuss Becomes First Afro-Latvian Woman to Head Collinsville PTA.”
At the present moment there appears to me to be political sensitivity and confusions surrounding the linguistic signaling of sexual differentiation. Let us not remove the lid from this can of worms just at the moment. In general, surely, we should want our words to be as specific load-bearing as possible. In languages still retaining significant gender categories in the nominal forms, this is pretty easy. You don’t have to say “woman doctor” or “male nurse”, which I still hear all the time. Efficiency would argue that Anglophones, with an ungendered nominal system, ought to be chary about banishing terms of specifying distinction that we already have. But we don’t want unnecessary ones like LatinX.
