“Fun” fact: the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (RAE) accepts the term “coronabebé” (babys born during the pandemic, a term that obviously no one has ever used and won’t even be used in the future) but doesn’t accept the gender neutral -e termination despite being very commonly used in left wing spaces and even casual conversation (if the speakers are cool and sexy and clever and awesome, obviously).
the people who try to use the RAE to stop gender neutral terms just baffle me
like, do they think the RAE are language kings? that they dictate how we’re supposed to speak? it’s the other way around. The RAE documents how we speak, we don’t speak how the RAE documents. They’re fighting back against things they don’t like, but if we ignore them and speak like that anyway they’ll concede. It has always happened
English governance over the past half-millennium is legendarily horrific, but I genuinely love the English language itself. A vibrant living language whose most revered poet, the Bard himself, is universally praised for his skill in inventing new words for new concepts. A language that has no top-down bureaucracy prescribing what words to use and when, but instead has its closest equivalent in the OED - an organization which celebrates neologisms and only acts to catalogue the words already in common use. A language that cheerfully borrows vocabulary from every other language on the planet regardless of race, culture, or creed. There is nothing pure about the English language - it is a mutt, a mongrel, a mishmash of a language - but that flexibility in wordplay enables great art.
I don’t speak Spanish, but I do dabble in learning it occasionally, when I have time. But I’ve found it super useful for certain things. I dated a nonbinary guy a while back, and while he did use he/him pronouns, he was very uncomfortable with the term “boyfriend,” and girlfriend didn’t fit either. We settled on novie. Neither of us speak Spanish, but it just fit way better.
It made both of us very happy to piss off conservatives in two languages.
“Fun” fact: the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (RAE) accepts the term “coronabebé” (babys born during the pandemic, a term that obviously no one has ever used and won’t even be used in the future) but doesn’t accept the gender neutral -e termination despite being very commonly used in left wing spaces and even casual conversation (if the speakers are cool and sexy and clever and awesome, obviously).
the people who try to use the RAE to stop gender neutral terms just baffle me
like, do they think the RAE are language kings? that they dictate how we’re supposed to speak? it’s the other way around. The RAE documents how we speak, we don’t speak how the RAE documents. They’re fighting back against things they don’t like, but if we ignore them and speak like that anyway they’ll concede. It has always happened
Academy of the (x) language types seem to be so determined to ossify a language I often suspect they’re just annoyed they can’t speak Classical Latin.
English governance over the past half-millennium is legendarily horrific, but I genuinely love the English language itself. A vibrant living language whose most revered poet, the Bard himself, is universally praised for his skill in inventing new words for new concepts. A language that has no top-down bureaucracy prescribing what words to use and when, but instead has its closest equivalent in the OED - an organization which celebrates neologisms and only acts to catalogue the words already in common use. A language that cheerfully borrows vocabulary from every other language on the planet regardless of race, culture, or creed. There is nothing pure about the English language - it is a mutt, a mongrel, a mishmash of a language - but that flexibility in wordplay enables great art.
I don’t speak Spanish, but I do dabble in learning it occasionally, when I have time. But I’ve found it super useful for certain things. I dated a nonbinary guy a while back, and while he did use he/him pronouns, he was very uncomfortable with the term “boyfriend,” and girlfriend didn’t fit either. We settled on novie. Neither of us speak Spanish, but it just fit way better.
It made both of us very happy to piss off conservatives in two languages.