“One hundred percent of all mothers are women.” To most people, this statistic is an example of stating the obvious and gets them asking “They needed a study to tell us that?” Well, apparently, there is some doubt about this in some circles - one of them being none other than the US House of Representatives where gendered family identifiers like father, mother, brother, sister have been effectively banned for the sake of being “inclusive”. Many people are scratching their heads over this. But the very clear truth is that languages don’t care about people’s feelings.
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, along with other Democrats, proposed replacing in the chamber’s “Rules of the House of Representatives” gender-specific terms with gender-neutral terms. For example, simple gendered family terms like “father”, “mother”, “brother”, and “sister”, would be replaced with gender-neutral terms such as “parent” and “sibling”. The proposal raised the ire of several House members as well as other conservatives - some of whom used words like “banned” and “eliminated” to describe it. The proposal quickly spread to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where it was clearly blown out of proportion and turned into a language controversy. Nearly every language has gender-specific terms for various family members, English included; but the proposed change is a virtue-signaling attempt to be inclusive of people who identify as transgender or non-binary, and is indicative of attempts in various parts of American society to force changes on language in order to accommodate the feelings of an extremely small minority.
In American society today, generations of Americans - especially the more recent generations: the “Millennials” (Generation Y) and what I call the “Zygotes” (Generation Z) - often complain about being offended by things other people say. For example, a communications professor was teaching a lesson and talked about how Chinese speakers use a particular word as a sort of filler (nei-ge, literally: that), much the way native Anglophones use “uh” or “um” as fillers. Because - at least to the untrained ears of these whiny “Zygotes” - the Chinese word in question sounds like the never-to-be-spoken “N-word”, some of the students complained to the university administration and, in response to the resulting controversy, the communications professor suspended teaching the class. As someone who has lived in China for several years, and who has heard native Chinese speakers use this particular word as a filler, I can tell you that it does not sound like that never-to-be-spoken “N-word”. Millennials and Zygotes can be brutal in their reactions to what people say, and their reactions can have harsh consequences for the offender.
Millennial and Zygote reactions to things that offend them have become a phenomenon in American culture - a phenomenon often called “cancel culture”. Much the way television programs are sometimes canceled due to low ratings, so also business executives, university professors, public figures, and others are suffering the effects of Millennial and Zygote temper tantrums. Cancel culture is a form of public shaming that occurs mainly on social media, but it has real-world effects as the targets of the canceling can include not only individuals but also product brands. The canceling itself is a form of boycott, which can hurt a a person’s career or a company’s bottom line. While some media, particularly CNN, deny that cancel culture exists and insist that it is a right-wing delusion, other media (e.g., Forbes, the New York Times) have written about it and it has officially been made an entry in the Cambridge and Merriam-Webster dictionaries - even Psychology Today is discussing research into the phenomenon. At the very least, the phenomenon shows an attempt by the two youngest generations to impose their feelings on language.
We can also see this attempt by the younger generations to impose their feelings on language in the use of third-person pronouns. It’s understandable why transgendered people might feel uncomfortable being referred to by the third-person pronouns corresponding with their biological sex - though it, frankly, is none of their business since these are third-person pronouns and are used when someone (first person) is talking to someone else (second person) about them (third person); unless they’re physically present during the conversation (including being a copy-to recipient of a written communication such as an e-mail), they really have no say in the matter. But it isn’t just transgendered people; it’s also these recent manufactured “identities” - genderfluid, genderqueer, demiboy, demigirl, and so on, all insisting on forcing others to use their “preferred pronouns” (many of which are manufactured pronouns that are not legitimately words in English, e.g., ze, zim, hir, and who knows how many others there are), to the point where New York City passed a law requiring workplaces to use people’s “preferred pronouns”. Then there are Americans of Hispanic ancestry who are trying to change Spanish by imposing the largely-unpronounceable-in-Spanish Latinx (there is no natural nx sound in Spanish) in order to accommodate the feelings of these people with various “identities” who are offended by gendered language. Whether it’s third-person “neopronouns” or trying to change the gendered nature of Spanish and other romance languages, it’s all about a very small minority of people trying to impose changes on language simply because they are offended by it.
These various attempts to change languages to accommodate the feelings of a very small minority of people - many of whom have taken up these manufactured “gender identities” because it seems to have become a fad among the aforementioned Zygotes - are nothing less than attempts at social engineering that have no place in free societies. George Orwell’s 1984 was not intended to be an instruction manual; so, this nonsense of imposing supposedly gender-neutral newspeak on languages needs to stop! It was bad enough when snooty rich people in England imposed Latin grammar on English, and worse when Ann Fisher in the 18th century insisted that people stop using singular they (which existed in English since before Geoffrey Chaucer) and use the male third-person pronoun instead. (Returning to the use of singular they is more than sufficient to accommodate those who find gendered third-person pronouns problematic.) Language does not care about people’s feelings and there is no place for trying to impose changes on languages simply because people feel offended.
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