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by elcano 1677 days ago
I wonder if the trend of using the 'Latinx' term falls under the hypercorrection definition or there's something else to describe it. I'm not passing judgement on the inclusiveness intention, but the English word for Latino and Latina is just Latin, which doesn't have gender. There's no need to mix linguistics with algebra and add a gender variable to the latin word.
2 comments

Coming from gendered languages, most Hispanics either don’t know about Latinx at all and the ones that do, most of them think it’s inappropriate. It is a bit strange to try to remove gender from a word for people who mostly speak a gendered language. It seems mostly to be a virtue signaling thing among a rather small almost exclusively American, english as first language subculture.

A bit like the bathroom I saw in a coffee shop that listed all the different kinds of people that were acceptable to use the single occupancy one toilet one sink room. Trying too hard to be inclusive can be an insult to the actual issues at hand.

There is a Swedish expression: nobody is named, and nobody is forgotten.

Usually you hear it in a workplace setting when people (often, a subset of the correct group) are being acknowleged for an acheivement of some kind.

As soon as you try to enumerate all of those groups you will undoubtedly forget someone, who will then take offense at the omission. So the saying is a reminder to not single out anyone.

cool expression. how does it go in swedish?
ingen nämnd, ingen glömd
“something else to describe it”

The best summing-up I’ve seen is: linguistic colonialism.