Offensive language

English, at least inclusive English, doesn't talk about firemen any more - we say fire fighters. To complain about the driver who has just cut you up the complaint is that "they" don't know how to drive rather than that he or she is an imbecile. I suspect that the word imbecile is also a word to be avoided but that's a whole extra thing. This is going to be a bit tricky to do because my blogs about language are never popular, and because it includes some Spanish words. Not all of what I'm going to write it is absolutely true but it's good enough for a blog of this nature.

I've been told by Spaniards that Spanish grammar can be pretty inflexible when compared to English. In English, for instance, we can turn almost any noun (a noun is the name for a thing), into a verb, (a doing word). Well established examples are to to book with the same meaning as to reserve, or to sky as in to sky a ball. Nowadays we TikTok too. Spanish has just three endings for verbs - ar,er, ir - which, I am told, makes it more difficult to plunder and use words as verbs. The other side of the coin though is that the way that a Spanish verb ends tells you who is doing the the thing. Bailo means I dance and baila means she, he or it dances. So she drives badly is exactly the same as he drives badly. In turn that means you need no strategy whatsoever to avoid sexist overtones in lots of situations.

Unfortunately that's not true for Spanish nouns. Nouns. as I said are things: egg, bottle, cow and so on. Having gender means that somewhere, somehow, somebody decided that each noun is either masculine of feminine. So while in English book, list, and rubbish are neutral in Spanish a book is masculine and a list is feminine. Sometimes this can seem a bit odd. El pene, the penis is, logically enough, masculine but lots of the other words for the same thing, verga and polla for instance are feminine. It's the same with la vagina, feminine, but coño and chocho, with the same meaning, are masculine.

Lots of nouns, these thing words, have a feminine and a masculine form when they are used to describe a person. A very common way to do this is simply to change the article (A/AN and THE are articles) before the name of the thing. So un estudiante is a male student, and una estudiante is a female student. 

Another very common way to differentiate between male and female is to change the letters at the  end of the  word. So, un alumno is a male student, una alumna is a female student. Very often, though far from inevitably, the ending is o for masculine and a for feminine. An example is hermana for sister, and hermano for brother. This is where one of the big problems come in modern usage. I, that's me personally, have one brother and one sister. If someone asks me about my family in English I would say I have a sister and a brother. The traditional Spanish answer to the same question with the same family would be that I have two hermanos. The most direct translation of dos hermanos into English is that I am saying I have two brothers. That's because the Spanish grammar rule is that if you have a mix of male and female words then the male version takes precedence. Grammarians say this has nothing to do with men taking precedence over women - it was just a 50/50 chance decision!!!! Modern Spanish people trying to avoid this would follow the English language style and say that they had one hermana and one hermano to make it clear. Nonetheless, someone trying to give me a bit of a Spanish lesson told me that the poster I'd designed inviting girls and boys to come along to Santa's grotto was poor Spanish - they were adamant that by inviting the boys the girls would have known they were welcome too.  Just like we know that Neil Armstrong meant women too when he took his giant leap for mankind. In writing this can be got around by using the at symbol herman@s. As you may imagine this is not a popular option with lots of people; " For the love of Pete it's a symbol - not a letter!!"

Language can be very emotive. I remember heated debates on British Radio 4 about the use of can as against may or how to pronounce envelope. This male precedence gender rule in Spanish is much deeper. The way round it of inviting male friends and female friends, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen seems, to the traditionalists only just marginally less stupid than inventing new words. And we won't even touch on how to include non binary people. Doubling up on words makes sentences more cumbersome but more modern thinkers go for the importance of equality and inclusiveness and don't worry too much about having to say more words or the technicalities of the word itself. They presume that context will explain slightly odd words. Although cartero means a postman cartera has, traditionally been the word for a wallet. It hasn't stopped the person ringing the entryphone to deliver the mail describing themselves as a cartera. It's still not an easy struggle. The lower house of parliament is called the Congress of the (male) Deputies. I suspect it will be a while before the name gets changed.

And the traditionalist have an ally in something called the REA, the Real Academia Española, which is the august body which tries to control the Spanish language and publishes the "definitive" Spanish dictionary. It's actually quite a useful body in trying to coordinate the language through all the counties where Spanish is spoken - so that Mexicans can talk to Equatorial Guineans and Nicaraguans but it is also entrenched in the past and thinks that messing around with hermanos/as is tantamount to wordslaughter. You'll no doubt be super surprised to learn that of the 46 people who currently make up the RAE 38 are men. Four of those eight women were elected in the last two or three years. My guess is that the RAE is not a hotbed of progressive thinking.

I know what I think about trying to make language more inclusive but in conversations with Spaniards (when we're not talking about food) I've found very few who agree.