Latina are an integral part of US culture
You read that correctly; if you are a social justice warrior, you should be delighted
Anyone trying to tell you objective reality is wrong is focused on an insidious form of social mind control. Be especially aware of strange people screaming at you for an “offense” which did not exist a week ago, and for - in this case - 96% of people still doesn’t exist. What, pray tell, you are wondering, can I be on about? And is it related to the basic grammatical “error” in my title?
Yes! I am going to anglosplain to you all why it is socially just to replace correct Spanish grammar with mangled Latinspanglish, all to improve multicultural love and harmony. Linguistically speaking, at least.
The whole recent kerfuffle around the neologism “Latinx” is based on the bizarre idea that the words Latino and Latina (pl. Latinos and Latinas), the received adjectives in the Spanish language, are “discriminatory” to someone or other in some way hard to fathom. Those “outdated” words are certainly not offensive to the people described by them, as polling has found only 4% of the population so described care in the slightest about this supposedly dire issue. 1
Well, the Romance languages are all gendered, so that’s a tricky hurdle. But there is good news for all the feverish social justice warriors who believe frantically that their rabid preoccupations of the moment outweigh millennia of cultural and linguistic development. Latin is the linguistic parent of Spanish, and Latin has not only male and female genders for all words, but also a third non-gendered neutral form.
So in that case, we can craft a non-gendered singular descriptor for any Hispanic people in America - or the 4% of those people who think this nonsense is meaningful. That happy neologism is “Latinum” for a man or a woman (or “womyn” if you choose) or whatever imaginary third, fourth and umpteenth derangement someone wants to come up with as “another gender.”
The plural of Latinum would therefore according to the grammatical rules of the Latin tongue be “Latina.”
Now, I want you to all go have fun saying as a mixed group of males and females, “Hi, we’re Latina,” and then go into agonizing discussions with people who don’t care in the first place why the “Latina” you are using is plural, inclusive and non-gender-biased, whereas your listener may wonder why a group of people would be using the singular feminine adjectival form of the word, meant for a girl or woman.
Have fun with that. I did with the title of this little rumination of mine. Esse rex bonum est.
I sure hope this “point,” whatever and such as it is, is remotely worth making.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-preference-trnd/index.html