At the California Institute for the Arts, there is an Office of Alumnx and Family Engagement. Click around at some university websites, and you can find more schools using “alumnx” to avoid the dire problem of the gendered plural Latin word for graduates of both genders, “alumni,” being masculine in that dead language from several millennia ago. Over at the website Electric Literature, there’s a great listicle of “non-fiction books about Filipinx America.”
Perhaps the deepest this trend has penetrated into the linguistic mainstream has been in the push to make “Latinx” (usually pronounced Latin-ex) into a word conspicuously right-thinking people say to be inclusive and progressive. It’s becoming a style guide commonplace in media outlets. It’s made its way into 2020 presidential candidates’ mouths, with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren using it while trying to appeal to millions of people during the Democratic debates. But liberal pollster ThinkNow checked, and it turns out that actual Hispanic people don’t identify with the label Latinx, or like it, or in many cases even know how to pronounce it. “Only 2% of our respondents said the label accurately describes them, making it the least popular ethnic label among Latinos,” wrote the pollsters. “While Latinos’ preferences for other labels vary by age, the limited appeal of ‘Latinx’ is consistent across generations and genders.” Whoever gave Warren the idea of using “Latinx” just didn’t think to ask.
The polling data represent a useful and interesting empirical finding. But also: No shxt. In Spanish, the letter “equis” is two syllables long and more difficult to say than any other letter save “doble v,” which only really gets used in loanwords from other languages. And, generalizing for a moment, the mean Hispanic American is probably more concerned with the health of the Catholic Church than with whether sociolinguistics has determined that there are problematic colonialist or gendered ideas implicit in the words on their census forms.
And if you stop to think about why X is the go-to letter when activists modify the language for social purposes, you can see that it is alienating by design. X is a weird letter. This is why we use it as a variable in algebra. It doesn’t look much like what we’re used to reading. It’s why we have phrases such as Planet X and Gen X.
On a 2018 World in Words podcast from Public Radio International, our hosts meet Shai Jacobs, who pushes for the honorific “Mx” in place of “Mrs.” or “Ms.” Money quote: “What’s nice about Mx. as a title is that it tells you nothing about a person. It doesn’t tell you their gender; it doesn’t tell you their marital status; it doesn’t tell you their qualifications or not. In the widest possible sense, it is for everyone.”
Activists are people for whom what’s nice about a word is that it tells you nothing. That’s why they like putting X everywhere. But most people are not activists, and they prefer words that can actually convey some meaning to the people hearing them.
