Liberals Massively Overestimate Popularity of ‘Latinx’ Among Hispanics
One thing that seems to really exercise the woke is the fact that there are two genders and, with the exception of a tiny number of intersex people, you’re either one or the other: male or female. The so-called ‘gender binary’ is such a profound part of human life that many languages require different word-endings when referring to men versus women.
One language where this is true is Spanish. Consequently, a person of Latin American origin who happens to be male is a ‘Latino’, while a person of such origin who happens to be female is a ‘Latina’.
Now, there are many Hispanic people in the U.S. – the global epicentre of woke – and the usage of ‘Latino’ and ‘Latina’ has been a source of great consternation there. After all, the language the woke are used to hearing, English, doesn’t have grammatical gender. To remedy this situation, they’ve come up with a gender-neutral term for Hispanic people: ‘Latinx’ (pronounced ‘la-teen-ex’).
If you haven’t hear of this term, don’t worry: neither had 76% of Hispanics in a 2019 Pew Research survey. Although it was apparently introduced by “queer communities on the internet” in 2004, the term only started appearing on Twitter at the end of 2014.
It seems, then, ‘Latinx’ really hasn’t caught on. In the 2019 Pew Research survey, Hispanics were asked which term they preferred to “describe the Hispanic or Latino population overall”. 61% said ‘Hispanic’, 29% said ‘Latino’ and just 4% said ‘Latinx’. Even among those who’d heard of the term, the vast majority preferred ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’.
The same thing was found in 2021 Gallup survey. Although the majority of Hispanics said it “does not matter” which term is used, when asked “if you had to choose”, the overwhelming majority said ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’, and just 5% said ‘Latinx’. Suffice it to say that ‘Latinx’ is not popular among those to whom it’s supposed to refer.
But this seems to be lost on U.S. liberals, as the Skeptic Research Center recently discovered. It asked a sample of 3,000 Americans to guess what percentage of Hispanics prefer the term ‘Latinx’. Results are shown below:
As you can see, the average guess among “very liberal” respondents was 38% – which is almost ten times higher than the true figure. Even conservatives were way off the mark, although they were more accurate than their “very liberal” counterparts.
Part of the explanation may be that, when people aren’t sure about a percentage, they have a tendency to ‘rescale’ their guesses toward 50%. However, this can’t explain why conservatives were more accurate than liberals. Another part of the explanation is surely that people have been bamboozled into thinking woke terms are more popular than they really are.
Polls and surveys show that liberals are more intolerant of conservatives than vice versa. Could this be why the former are so poorly-informed about things like police shootings and the usage of buzzwords – they just aren’t hearing the other side’s perspective?
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And in frence, everything in the language is masculine or feminine! So how’s that going to work?
Hahaha…exactly, Dings, they’ll have to completely overhaul the entire lexicon and include a gender neutral element to each word. The poor loves will be tearing out their multi-coloured hair!
This has been a constant topic of hot discussions for German (German nouns can have three genders) for all of my life. It started out with always using both male and female forms and then proceeded to grammatical erasure of the male sex. Eg, contemporary duckheads make statements like:
90% aller Dirigent:innen sind männlich.
Translated, this would mean 90% of all female conductors are male. They’re really showing their true colours with this one.
Actually everything in Spanish is either masculine or feminine too: eg, el brazo = the arm (masculine), la pierna = the leg (feminine), un coche/un carro = a car (masculine), una casa = a house etc etc (feminine)
In German, which I’m learning via Duolingo, there are 3 “genders” which apply to everything:
Der – masculine
Die – feminine
Das – neutral
There’s no logic to it:
Der hund (the dog)
Die katze (the cat)
Das schwein (the pig)
Similar with clothing and pretty-much everything else: there’s no logic. You just have to memorise the correct definitive article and the grammatical structure of the language depends on getting the correct definitive article.
I guess they could decide to just switch to “everything das” ….. but I can’t see that happening any time soon. If they were going to simplify the language that way, they’d have done it centuries ago.
That’s fascinating.
Are the pubs open?
It is quite a paint-drying article, isn’t it, HP?
Maybe, though it’s another example of attempts to alter and control thought by corrupting language
“Hispanic” and “Latin” are sort of misleading terms in themselves. While it’s true that those people speak Spanish (or Portuguese), the vast majority of the population of Central and South America are not fully European but a mixture of European and indigenous and African, and that proportion is probably higher among immigrants entering the US.
There are 10 kinds of people on this planet, those who understand binary and those who don’t. Considering that humans can either be male or not male and either be female or not female, human sex can be modelled as 2-bit binary number. Like all number representation systems, the binary system represents every integral number as sums of multiples of powers of some base quantity. For binary, the base quantity is 2 and the possible multipliers are 0 and 1. In order to model human sex, we now assign 2^0, 2 to the zeroeth power, ie, the number 1, to male and the next bit, 2^1, two to the first power, 2, to female. This means we know of the following possible combinations: 0 0 — neither male nor female 0 1 — male but not female 1 0 — female but not male 1 1 — female and male so-called intersex people fall either into the category 0 0 or into the category 1 1, ie, they’re not a third sex, just certain combinations of two sexes. If they were, we would have a third property, let’s call it Matt Hancock, which would distinct from the other two and… Read more »
OMG, Noah, how many times??? There are only two SEXES, not genders! There are as many genders as these poor inadequates want to imagine – but there are only two SEXES!!! If this simple point were ever grasped by all those who routinely misuse these terms, the whole absurd argument would go away. GENDER is a construct – not an objective reality; therefore any number may be dreamt up by leftie sentimentalists who require artificial support to make them feel better about themselves. SEX is what is unalterably determined by their chromosomes. They ignore the word SEX because it denies the males the opportunity to use the ladies’ toilets and perve on little girls, and it denies the females the opportunity to call themselves ‘men’ while having babies in the time-honored fashion. This is a problem of semantics and nothing more! ps: I don’t include the truly unhappy and genuinely confused in my anger with these people. Many ‘transgender’ people deserve sympathy and psychiatric support. They are usually towards the younger end of the transgender spectrum. They tend to be very private and not interested in vulgar self-publicity. But many are cold and calculating and are out for nothing more… Read more »
By the way, Noah – sorry, the clause of my rant doesn’t apply to you, despite your use of ‘gender’ for ‘sex’. Something to guard against though.
I mean “the LAST clause of my rant”… good grief, sorry.