this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
843 points (98.1% liked)
Political Memes
5494 readers
1950 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
i know that every time 'latinx' comes up online it gets spammed with 'rich white libs made it up' replies but i've also seen deep in those comment chains people claiming to be latin american trans people and that the term was created by the latin american trans community itself.
also, typically those replying with the above knee jerk 'white libs' response tend to be far right when i dug into their histories. on youtube and reddit over the years, that is. haven't seen this discourse on lemmy. also i don't have any sources for the origin of the term, just thought you might want to reconsider potentially being hateful to the latin american trans community if that wasn't your intention.
and tbh, even if it was some dem focus group in new york that came up with it, it's pretty easy to see that trans people might take the above kind of response to that term as one rooted in hatred.
I am both latine and trans and latinx is fucking dumb lol so heres another one for the anecdote
Are you American though?
Also latine looks like latrine.
it doesnt sound like that at all and latrine isnt even a spanisch word? Thats like complaining about the korean 니가 (sounds like neega) being to similar to the n-word. Or the eveb funnier discussion of american youth discovering the German "Digga" and immediately coming to the conclusion that this must be the n-word in disguise.
For the uninitiated: Probably via "mit jemanden dick sein", "to be thick with someone", meaning to be good friends, probably related to "mit jemanden durch dick und dünn gehen", "to go with someone through thick and thin", meaning exactly what you think. "Proper" orthography would be Dicker but as it arose among workers in Hamburg that's nowhere close to the actual pronunciation so it's usually rendered "Digga" or "Digger". Pronounced the same, we don't do rhotics at the end of words and all the German I mentioned should probably be Low Saxon or at least Missingsch.
If you want to translate it to English... "thiggy" I guess?
Bonus: Europeans who use the term "BIPOC" unironically in a European context. With, you know, the "I" referring to literally the vast majority of the population. Over here the term you're looking for would be "autochthone minority".
FROM THE TOP ROPE!
my understanding is latinx and latine are pronounced exactly the same, just different spelling. you're using latine while saying latinx is dumb and made up by shitlibs?
So in Spanish you have a word like Oaxaca or México, where the x is in the middle of the word and is pronounced like the h in ha.
When x is at the end of a word its pronounced like k+s.
Or when it is the first letter of a word, its basically an s sound.
So, we get three possible pronunciations rooted in Spanish:
la-tin h (i don't think this really works at all unless you just trail 'tin' with some kind of soft ... consonant only sound?)
la-tinks (arguably this is the most correct pronunciation strictly following the rules of Spanish)
la-tins (works but only if you do not follow Spanish rules for how x is pronounced)
é or e is a vowel pronounced like eh, tbus:
la-tin-EH or la-tin-eh
which is different from latino (OH) and latina (AH).
If latinx and latine are pronounced the same, then that would indicate that a word has been made up which breaks the otherwise quite strict pronunciation rules governing Spanish, introducing an English style 'exception' where this particular word is pronounced this particular way for no apparent reason.
This is a big reason why many (but not all) do not like this term. It either only works when written or to a person familiar with English, who usually pronounce it la - tin - ecks.
I'm Latino, latine seems more plausible based on how I grew up. I just hate how it's a single letter off from latrine.
Do we jump the rules for something really new to our society? Maybe. I personally think a lot of this is rooted in people's limited understanding of how postfixes work in Spanish, American education for example explains that anything ending with a = feminine, o = masculine, but that ignores context and etymology which I won't go into here.
I'd equate it to our initial minor discomfort with referring to humanity as 'mankind', anyone with more than trivial education understands the word to be non-gendered.
Actually English native feminists and leftists tend to avoid using the word "mankind". The more time passes, the more that word is considered a relic of a misogynist past that's no longer relevant. You still see that sort of language in old books like The Lord Of The Rings, where humans are referred to a "men", regardless of gender. And it's jarring to modern readers who are native speakers. People aren't used to it anymore.
English speakers are improving our language to remove sexism and Spanish speakers are too. Language is a tool, it's supposed to help people. If it's not helping people, it needs to be repaired or upgraded.
Missing the forest for the trees here. This is a perfect example of outsider dissipation of our energy in making a conclusive decision on how to proceed.
Read my comment again, you'll notice what I'm equating the discomfort to as it currently stands.
Historically, "man" is absolutely neutral, meaning "human, person". You then have wif for woman and wer for man and also wifman and werman. I think it would've been better to go back to those terms, already tried and true just fallen out of use after the Norman conquest, than to try to haphazardly and awkwardly declare the use of the term "mankind" sexist. Cudgels and shibboleths invented by the performative faction to have a way to deem themselves morally superior.
Women and enbies??
If I had meant that then I would have said that. But I don't, so I didn't.
Also I resent the implication. Don't pretend you don't know what performativity means in this context.
You said something intentionally vague that I suspect to be a dogwhistle. And now that I've asked what specifically you mean, you're refusing to be specific.
Huh. I never considered this before, but, the use of a shibboleth actually feels kinda related in a "two sides of the same coin" way to how dog whistles are used, aren't they?
Like, both are means of individuals using memetics to subtly transmit their IFF disposition toward their chosen faction in an ideological conflict.
Except that the connotation of a dog whistle is that it also paints a target, drawing attention from their faction to designate a given subject, be it an entity or concept or object, as IFF-Hostile.
Oh come to think of it, actually...! IF used cynically and manipulatively, accusing someone of using a dog whistle could ITSELF hypothetically be a dog whistle, couldn't it?
...
I feel the urge to clarify before I hit post that this is NOT an insinuation against you, though! I think you have a point, the person you're calling out is legitimately being shady and evasive.
Especially after that shit they said in their reply about "it's not my job to educate you" -- that's one of my biggest red flags for social media grifting:
When someone actually BELIEVES IN their rhetorical position, they're usually excited to share its details with other people, not dismissive and terse, because social media is an arena where the one person we're responding to is FAR from the only person who can be moved by our voice. Passionately elucidating one's points may not move one's interlocutors, but it CAN sway multitudes of observers who can become motivated to speak up.
Feels kinda poetically similar to how our neurons arrive at the consensus of a decision in our brains and how bee colonies decide which flower patches to visit and such!
...particularly from the performative faction on the left I alluded to, they love that line. Your usual fash would just call you dumb for not understanding them when they don't want to back their stuff up, which of course is kinda the same thing just without the smugness.
You're right that I don't believe in it, I was going for a "taste of their own medicine" thing which apparently backfired. There's a fucking metric fuckton of papers and discussions in leftist literature critiquing leftist performativity, goes back at least as far as Adorno (though not under that name, quoth him: "Actionism is the anti-intellectualism of the left". It's far from vague, or even obscure.
To the "I'm using the standard meaning of performativity, don't bend my words" (what? enbies and women are performative? Doesn't even begin to make sense) I got the reply of "vague" and "dogwhistle", adding to the prior "yo misogynist and enbie-hater". I thus concluded that they were sitting on a high horse, that they're engaging here to feel good about being, in their own eyes, a moral and upright person, not to actually engage. And I gave precisely that attitude of theirs as justification why "It's not my responsibility to educate them". More correct would've been "I'm not your therapist" but oh boy that's even nastier. I rather take the downvotes.
Overall, you indeed won the main prize today: Someone realised that in/outgroup mechanics work the same on the left and right. You don't see that kind of covert othering I was subjected to by MindTraveller from e.g. anarcha-feminists because, being anarchists, they understand the toxicity of these kinds of dynamics, how they reinforce rule and authority, how they're anything but organising horizontally, at eye level.
Also experience shows that explaining things to the performative faction doesn't change their position -- because they're not here to argue. They're here to beat you with their chosen cudgel so they can feel good about themselves. Related recommendation: Zena&Poppy on the puritanical "progressive, which often is the end-stage of performative folks.
It's not my responsibility to educate you about elementary political terms. I would be willing to if you weren't sitting there on your high and mighty steed, all morally superior, nurturing an appearance of being politically informed.
So either get down from there or, you know, google. Also google shibboleth while you're at it. And read up on the psychology of in/outgroup dynamics.