alt Hacker NewsReminds me of that one time my partner mentioned "Latino" in a meeting, referring to people from Central and South America in broad terms (this was a marketing meeting, where customers are naturally grouped together along various dimensions).
She was told to not use "Latino"; but to use "LatinX" instead. What hurt more was the implication that she was being insensitive.
When I learned of it, I asked my Mexican friends which one they preferred. None of them had heard of "LatinX" and were as confused as I was.
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The world is full of people wanting to be offended on behalf of other people.
Latinx appears to be on the way out now as well, to be replaced by Latine, for exactly the situation you described. "Latinx" didn't come out of the broader community of native speakers, and was seemingly rejected due to that fact.
I was born in Peru and I absolutely abhor the word "LatinX". I assume people meant well, but ironically, it exhibits the "we Americans known better than you" attitude that liberals usually avoid.
No one has been saying LatinX for years. Why the anti-lib propaganda from 2022? Are y'all really that desperate to connect with folks?
Was I wrong in assuming that "Latinx" was only intended for written language? Because it's not pronounceable in any way that makes sense.
“Latinx” is weird because it seems to have arisen from a set of privileged English speakers deciding that poor downtrodden Latinas were being hurt by a word they never complained about and pushing this as the “appropriate” word. It’s so clearly not born of the Latino community because that’s not the construction they would use.
I remember reading about some similar thing with French and the French president’s wife responding that the language was beautiful the way it was and they don’t need outsiders telling them how to gender (or not) their words.