We Need to Talk About Germxn
You may well have seen the Twitter thread in the picture before. If you haven’t, please do look at it. Take it in. Take in the complete, absolute and utter stupidity of that final message. What you are looking at there, however, isn’t simply the daftest thing ever said, it’s far, far more than that. It’s a Trojan horse being wheeled through the gates of the English language.
Before anyone runs away thinking that I’m a right-wing keyboard warrior, I will stress that I am not. In our childishly polarised world, I fall on the liberal/left side of the fence. Most critically here, I genuinely believe in sexual equality. And I’m here to tell you that final message, if it was made with any kind of sincerity, it is a very serious contender for the Most Pathetic Tweet in the History of the World Award, if such a thing exists.
The idiocy of it is multi-layered. It is approaching a state of transcendental clottery.
“Stop using gendered language.” Er, okay, that’s German gone for a Burton, for starters. Der, die and das are right out of the window, here. Maybe German speakers should all learn Finnish and use that instead. Finnish is, as I understand it, the least gendered of the European languages. And there’s really no good reason why speakers of French, Spanish and English shouldn’t follow this noble example, too, is there? My first thought is that that would actually be quite an upheaval. And maybe, you’re thinking that, too — but, come on, “is it really so difficult?”
So, now we get to the nub of the matter. “Is it really so difficult to use germxn?” Well, yes. I’m seeing an instant problem here. How in God’s name does one pronounce germxn? I’m struggling with this one. Maybe the word rolls off the tongue in Basque (though I doubt it) but it just can’t be rendered in English. “Mxn” is simply not a usable combination of letters.
Quite why the word German should lose its status as a proper-noun along with half of its vowels is a question that we’ll save for another day. Let’s get straight to the elephant in the room. It’s not so much an elephant as an overgrown woolly mammoth, to be honest. German is not a gendered word. How can you even contemplate de-gendering something that doesn’t have a gender to start with?
The x-ing of words seems to have started as a short-hand. People would write Latinx in place of Latina/Latino. It’s a rather lazy and ugly way of doing things but arguably it’s slightly less clumsy than a more computer-friendly regular expression such as “Latin[ao]”. Somewhere along the line, like everything else on this increasingly demented planet, that x has become politicised. A cocktail stick that can be jabbed into the heart of a word in order to fly a little paper flag.
I am at a complete loss to imagine exactly what kind of person would feel “more secure and safe” because people are randomly taking a hatchet to passing vowels. Vowels don’t kill people, people do.
Nobody, but nobody, should stand for this mindless butchery of our language. People are trying to rob us of our very right to communicate.
So, how should we label this linguistic slaughter? Orwellian, would certainly seem quite apt, but in the modern parlance the term would be “woke.”
Once upon a time, it would have been described as political correctness but the new political correctness is a simple diktat that anyone who points out that Brexit is a bit crap or that Trump has the IQ of an orange is terminally woke and must somehow approve of Germxn. I have seen this message re-Tweeted with the simple text “I f***ing hate Liberals”. Yes, that’s impolite and inarticulate and all the rest of it, but let us apply some of our liberal empathy and try to understand where that’s coming from.
“Woke” was, of course, developed and cultivated by the far right as an insult. It was very much designed to tar Trump-detractors with the same brush as the anti-vowel fruitcakes who insist that we all talk of Germxny. Rather than simply saying “yes, we agree, those people are “woke” numbskulls and we absolutely should laugh at them”, many on the left have fallen right into the trap. “Aha! We’ll take the label and wear it with pride, it worked with “gay”, back in the day, it will work now. Woke simply means not racist and not sexist.” That was the point when the gates of Troy were thrown wide open in welcome.
If the left does not decry Germxn twittery, it does become precisely what people on the right paint it as — detached from reality. In exactly the same way that those on the right who do not call out racism play into the preconceptions of the left that the right is solely fuelled by hatred.
The world is allowing itself to become polarised by extremists at both ends of the spectrum and we are letting them do it. There is more that unites the rest of us than divides us, and we can remind ourselves of that by having an equally good laugh at both people who dress up as Hitler and people who think that he spoke Germxn.
