Member-only story
Write it, don’t pronounce it!
When I lived in Mexico in the mid nineties, I loved seeing Latin@ used somewhere in writing. It told me Spanish is alive and well, and that folks were ready to have some fun with it. I don’t remember the exact sentence anymore, but it was something such as “What would your latin@ partner say about that?”
The way it is written allows the reader to either read it as latino or as latina, and instead of needing to write both genders out in a more complicated sentence, they are both captured in one word. Isn’t that fun?
I love language and I really like it when people play with language.
So when I first saw latinx, I quite enjoyed it, too. It captured the exact same function as latin@. However, that pleasure soured quickly when I started hearing people say the word with the x pronounced at the end as well. Quelle horreur!
Folks somehow unfamiliar with the idea that language can be used artfully (and that we can have fun with written language), just started mouthing the word latinx as if that was the proper thing to say. That is very painful.
Fast forward to the popularization of hearing latin-X, and we find ourselves in a culture war — How American of us!
The issue is not about the actual issue. The war about latinx is not about it being a written word…
