can’t talk

Despite the fact that there is a consensus that language generates reality, the issue of inclusive language continues to have resistance among a certain part of the professionals in this field.Getty

Humanity has overcome notable periods of obscurantism, in which freedom of expression and thought, opinion, the right to dissent, free choice, the way of feeling faith and the advancement of science have been persecuted and punished. We have reached a stage in which, although we have not been able to fully overcome these phenomena, at least we have managed to demonstrate and combat them. But we backed down.

It is the time of great freedoms, but, ironically, one can no longer speak, because words are now part of an invisible chain of antipersonnel mines that threatens to detonate with every attempt to salivate.

No one is allowed to have cats or dogs; a living being cannot be the owner of another, so we must speak of “interspecies families”. What a problem if you love animals, but do not believe that cats or dogs are children!

Humour, which can be questioned when it goes too far, mortifies or offends, is now the subject of legal actions and court settings. Comedians must carry a bottle of cream in their pocket to hydrate each word, lest they end up irritating skin, when the fundamental charm of their trade was precisely the blister.

Referring to blindness, deafness or dumbness always ends badly. The principle of linguistic economy, cousin of Ockham’s Razor (the simplest way of saying things is the best) is ignored. Leaving aside that fundamental rule of speaking naturally and concisely, today we refer to “a person with disabilities” visual, hearing, speech, physical, intellectual, mental…

The human being, masculine in the gender of the essence of language, is outlawed; not so humanity, although it is preceded by a grammatical feminine that, yes, does not bother. We navigate with difficulty in the waters of “everyone and everyone”; of “boys, girls and adolescents” (soon also adolescents?); of the “daughters” or “l@s hij@s”; of neologisms as alien to the beauty of the language as the “motherland”, although the concept of mother country subsists in the mouths of a handful of brave and “brave”.

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The arrival of what is politically correct in the language causes officials to become entangled or bray, as in the case of those in uniform who, fearful of arousing the anger of others, allude to “la feminine” to refer to a woman.

We pay the price of living in a world where diversity demands precisions that only a minority can handle with skill Certain concepts already require half an alphabet to be enunciated without generating irascibility: L, G, B, T, I, A, K and the recent addition of symbols like the +, because in homosexualism and bisexualism millions of people no longer feel represented.

A few years ago, when we began to feel the arrival of that crusade for the exact word, even at the cost of logic or the natural structure of each language, with very caustic terms, the writer Hector Abad Faciolince evidenced it by doing what he knows how to do best. (yes, write, which is no longer possible!):

“Gender is a grammatical category that has nothing to do with sex. When I say, for example, that ‘people have a stomach’, even though ‘people’ has a feminine gender, I am not excluding men. And although ‘stomach’ is masculine in gender, it is carried inside by both sexes equally. In fact, the virile organ par excellence usually has the feminine gender in Spanish and (excuse my chaste ears) I can cite the cases of the verga, the polla, the dick and the monda, four identical instruments of the feminine gender, although obviously of the masculine sex. . And in Spain, at least, the inverse happens with the corresponding part of the woman and, no matter how typically feminine the pussy is (in terms of sex), the gender of this word is masculine”.

We lost the battle. We get rid of the yoke only to strengthen it and keep it firmly attached to the neck. We went back to being oxen. I correct: we returned, all of us, to be the oxen.

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