The kicker for me is if we want to anglicize Spanish because we know better than them... we could just say Latin! It's already a word! But it doesn't come with ingroup signaling and so here we are..

Right?!

Kublai was on this train 700 years ago: https://youtu.be/FJUueJzLr54?t=169

When you read Latinx in Spanish it reads as "Latín Equis".

"Equis" is a word we use when talking about something or someone irrelevant. Like the x in an algebra formula.

https://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=equ...

Wait, what does that mean wrt the Dos Equis beer then? Is the most interesting man in the world actually irrelevant?

I think you meant most interesting person in the world.

Geez.

TIL The beer was first named Siglo XX which stands for 20th century. The name Dos Equis later came about from the roman numeral for twenty, which is XX.

In my understanding “Latin” also includes people from Latin Europe, (France, Italy, Spain, etc.), so it’s a bit less precise.

I heard a member of the Lantinx community say they hate the term Latinx because X literally difficult to say in Spanish lol, it’s like Latin-ehkess not latin-ex

We hate it because it's colonialist, patronizing and makes no sense within our linguistic roots.

Excuse my ignorance but let me treat this thread as a safe space:

should I prefer the use of the term "pendejex" to be gender inclusive in Spanish?

When in doubt, and to be inclusive, you can use "idiota de mierda", which is not gender-specific.

Great advice, seriously

> to be gender inclusive in Spanish?

Just look for a different term that is already gender inclusive. Maybe one day us Spanish speakers will agree on gender-inclusive inflections, but currently -e is not really having any traction outside dedicated LGBT circles, and -x or -ex even less. I admit I hesitate to speak to the odd person expecting -e and I'm supposed to benefit from it catching on!

Grammatical gender just sits in a similar position to closed class words: you can't just add new gendered inflections to a language and expect speakers to still be able to speak it without effort, specially when it propagates to adjectives through linguistic agreement. Imagine if someone asked you to use tay instead of singular the or something similar.

I can't comment on pendejo/a as it isn't part of my dialect, so I'm not sure what would be equivalent with similar nuance, but I doubt anyone cares about being inclusive when insulting.

Honestly, most people (including me) don't care about gender neutrality in the latino community. In any case, pendeje is the correct way to write it and pronounce it.

X is read as "Equis". And Equis is a word some Latin American countries used as a synonym for irrelevant/whatever/not important.

Lol, ya my friend said Latinx is dumb as hell, said it’s even hard to say (he’s Mexican)

Also note that Latino is a Spanish word, Latinx is obviously an English word. So we have non Latino white people telling Latinos to use an English word to refer to themselves

Definitely no colonial undertone to this dynamic whatsoever

Worth noting that Latinos are themselves colonizers (well, at least of mixed ancestry). Latinx is still stupid and condescending, but framing it as colonialism is a bit reductive.

In the early 1800s my Latin American country still had separate towns for different ethnicities, but today most of us are of mixed ancestry.

Does the modern definition of colonizer include mixed ancestry descendants too?

Considering how many white americans can cite 1/4-1/8 native american descent, yeah.

Or maybe that proves the point that just because you had ancestors of a certain stripe does not mean you are of that kind.

Latinx is not even an English word, it is a made-up word. It is not language evolution but an attempt at language revolution which fortunately seems to have failed thus far. May it keep on failing and may it - and the multitude of other attempts - serve as a warning that Newspeak better remain in the dystopic novels from which it often seems to originate.

I've seen Latinx used by US universities and Fortune 500 companies, but not really used by the people I know. It may be different in more affluent or academic circles though.

Furthermore, Hispanic != Latino (or even Latinx)

Specifically, Hispanic relates to Spain and the Spanish speaking world, whereas Latino indicates Latin America which includes Brazil, but not Portugal.

In the context of US immigrant groups they’re almost the same, as there are huge amounts of Mexicans, Central Americans, Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and their descendants, but relatively few people from Spain, Portugal, or Brazil.

Argentina, for example, has a huge population of those from Italy. Brazil from Portugal, Mexico and central America from Spain. This is why you generally don't want to call an Argentine or Brazilian "Hispanic".

My guess as to why we call the continent "Latin America" is because for a long time Argentina dominated, being one of the richest and most advanced countries in the world, even giving birth to the expression "As rich as an Argentine". It is is still very important even today, but I don't want to get my Brazilian friends upset with me.

In order to interpret this stuff correctly you have to understand that we’re talking about ethnic/cultural groups in the US, not in Latin America.

There are not many Argentines in the US, so the distinction rarely comes up.

If you want to know why, in the US, we call someone an "X-American", whether that is a German-American, Latin-American, Hispanic-American, African-American, then you need to know where these terms come from. Words always have a historical, rather than a logical, explanation.

> - The vast majority of Hispanic people don't like "Latinx"

It's worse than that. The majority of Hispanic people (around 75%) haven't even heard of it [1]. Only about 3% use it. Even among the demographic that it has the most recognition in (ages 18-29) only 42% of heard of it, and only 7% use it.

Many also find it offensive [2].

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/many-latinos-say-latin...

The thing is though, in Spanish, the masculine form of a noun already also takes the duty of neuter form. E.g. “Latinos” already refers to a general group of people, regardless of gender. It doesn’t mean a group of only men.

It doesn't matter to these sorts of people. "Guys" is similarily in generic use in English and I've seen mods of an ostensibly inclusive space immediately get on the case of a newcomer who just said "hey guys" as a greeting on arriving to a Discord server.

Any time I see a word abused with an -x suffix, I file it in the same mental bucket as the people who stylized their IRC nicks like xXDeSTRoYeRXx.

New Hispanic rule: you can't use "LatinX" unless you agree to be called "GringX". You can try to impose something if you accept another random imposition in return, equivalent exchange style.

BTW, GringX is pronounced as GriguEquis.

Anecdotally, the vast majority of Latinos I know hate the term as a virtue signal purity test invented by academics expressing guilt for their whiteness.