Have your language spayed or neutered
Longtime viewers of the classic CBS game show “The Price is Right” undoubtedly remember iconic host Bob Barker’s closing admonition to “have your pets spayed or neutered” to curb the animal population. These days, radical environmentalists feel the same way about the human population, ever since Paul Ehrlich’s 1970s era book The Population Bomb, which was as wrong in its predictions of environmental catastrophe as are today’s warnings about the dire consequences of climate change that have to be updated every ten years to postpone the time of disaster by another ten years. Efforts to reduce population growth, beginning with China’s one–child policy, have been so successful that every advanced society, including the United States, now has a birth rate well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. (Sorry, per birthing person.)
Since our bored wokies are now searching for new worlds to conquer, allow me to suggest a field that is ripe for experimentation. It is now established doctrine in academic circles, including medical schools, that the human race, unlike virtually every animal species in the world, is non-binary with regard to gender. Forget what you learned in high school biology about X and Y chromosomes. The American Medical Association, in its semi-infinite wisdom, now recommends that birth certificates not record the infant’s gender, which they assert is an arbitrary assignment based on external genitalia; instead, they advocate waiting until the child is old enough to decide that question for him/her/itself. Current fashion has set that date at as low as five years of age, after which the child’s wishes must be fulfilled using puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery. Parents who object are subject to having Child Protective Services remove their children from their home and placed in foster homes with suitably woke adults. (Amusingly, the nations of Europe are backing away from this new paradigm, as the UK has joined numerous other countries in banning puberty blockers and surgical mutilation for minors.)
Before the Left becomes too outraged over the beginnings of resistance to its policies, I propose a diversion. Gender ideology has dictated the use of gender-neutral terminology: stewards and stewardesses have become flight attendants, waiters and waitresses have become servers, female thespians have been lumped together with males under the name of actors, Latinos and Latinas are now merged as Latinx, and so on. This is surely too slow a process for progressives, so why not go directly to the heart of the matter by eliminating all gender references from human languages. Some progress has been made with pronouns by introducing neutral terms such as ze/xe/hir, but so many pesky nouns, verbs, and adjectives remain gender-bound.
The easiest languages to change are those like German and Yiddish, which have three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Simply make everything neuter à la Bob Barker, More challenging will be Romance languages – French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian—which have no neuter gender and attach gender-specific suffixes to verbs and adjectives. Curing this ailment will require creativity. Perhaps all the suffixes can be replaced with artificial constructs, as has been done with nouns and pronouns. Since Latinx hasn’t been popular, one alternative might be to try –yx, with “y” serving as a substitute vowel, pronounced as a short “i.” Besides making pronunciation easier, this formulation might remind people of gender-neutral terms from biology, such as coccyx.
I confess to being unsure how to proceed with Hebrew, which has all manner of internal vowel and consonant changes to reflect gender, case, and number. I’ll leave that for the Hebrew grammarians to figure out.
Thus academia will need to lead the way by hiring a slew of lexicographers. Once this project has been completed, an even more intricate one looms. Since wokeism is obsessed with erasing the past, as Communism has done, its proponents would undoubtedly welcome linguistic means to erase the past tense. We can confidently expect that the Federal government will provide billions of taxpayer dollars for such a monumental, history-making project. Congressional appropriating committees are well advised to start advance planning early, and high school and college English and foreign language departments need to prepare as well.
Happy neutering!