We could talk about the Big Storm down in Florida. Or maybe who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines up in the Baltic. Instead, we have often become a little hysterical over the arbitrary changes to our language. External Imposition! It is irritating since it comes and goes based on political need. You may have heard the commotion this morning about the partisan issue regarding changing the Spanish language. That matter has been an issue for quite a while. Some vanguard advocates have argued that the “vowel ending” on many words en Espanol conveys a “gender” associated with the word.
“Latino” or “Latina” are examples of that grammatical convention which is sort of efficient by conveying twice as much information in a single noise.
To make things better and more inclusive, some have advocated changing the “o’s” and “a’s” to “x’s.” There is a problem, though. Like uncertainty about how that would be pronounced. Some non-Spanish speakers call it “Latin-Ex.” Others are more subtle, blending the hard consonant into something softer that conveys the rounder shape of Spanish words without sounding like a digestive supplement.
Reaction? Apparently those who speak Spanish think their language is fine as it is, and they don’t need help from non-speakers of their mother tongue, or “lengua materna,” in proper pronunciation. Of course, the more assertive partisans would hold that the progressive version would be “lengua Maternx.” With the soft “a” in language being just a soft vowel with the “x” in Mother not having a dash in front of it. It is awkward just to type the last letter, and we apologize.
We don’t want to get into the dispute on a language that is not ours. Apparently, Hispanic people (O’s, A’s and X’s) don’t like it either. The progressive answer is to convert Spanish to French, and use the less declarative closing phrase “les,” which avoids use of two thirds of the controversial vowel. We have a feeling that if Spanish speakers wanted to be French, they could have done it already. But we will leave that up to those who are passionate about their “vowels.”
Over here in the English-speaking world, we don’t have quite the same number of gender-associated word endings. Our faults tend to be associated with titles- which is to say “man” and “woman,” as the suffix to other descriptive words like “Chairman.” A number of replacements have been proposed, some of which are sort of awkward. “Birthing people” has been floated as a replacement for “mother.” You get the idea that they are even more annoying than the changes to the Spanish language, particularly ones dealing with recurring features of biologic function. We don’t require scientific help on that, and ignore those substitutions since they are ridiculous.
There is another set of concurrent casualties in the language, though, and we just wanted to pay tribute to one of the words that has been done in and cast aside. It was not one of the ones with a partisan pallor, but something a little less obvious.
Here it is, controversial or not. The word: “Twice.” You may have heard it before, which in older times referred to an action performed “two times.” It was sort of a useful word. Short. Pithy: “We did something two-times,” or, “Did it twice.” You can see that is shorter and more useful.
Maybe the word police were called in, due to the distinct rhyming issue. “Twice” has clear issues there, including confusion with anything frozen (ice), or particularly pleasing (“nice.”) Now, all the commercials not featuring people of different hues or genders dating one another would be doing something “two times,” rather than just “twice.”
So, one problem solved and another created. The former term seems a little juvenile in diction, like the speaker had not yet learned the more adult version of the shorter and more succinct term “twice.” We could put an “x” in it, but you can see that issue immediately and it doesn’t just mean looking around for the italicskey. Plus, we already have words with that combination of letters in them, but they mean something else. Like “Twixt,” which is a strange enough construction to seem modern, even if it is just a shortened version of “betwixt,” meaning “in between,” which wasn’t what we were trying to say at all.
Which actually is part of the larger effort, like replacing “equality” with “equity,” which sort of sounds the same but means something completely different. We understand that is the point, but are not prepared to recraft our entire syntax before lunch, you know? Who could tell if it was male or whatever that other thing was? We are still wondering how the politics wound up in the prose, but if we are not supposed to add an “x” to demonstrate our virtue, we are curious about what to use instead.
We would re-phrase that emotion to say it more than once over again, but that leads us to saying things like “two times,” instead of just doing it again. You know. Like “twice.”
Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com