Not even Santa is safe

Gender nonsense? Well not quite what you think. As we enter the last days of Christmas 2019 it gives me the chance to discuss a subject I have been meaning to write about for some time…

But this is a tale of political correctness and/or so-called diversity and equality in its most ridiculous form.

Recent news stories suggest some of these self-styled gender harassment groups are saying that Santa should be changed to be gender neutral. Yes; this is the world my boy is growing up in. But then the world is hardly a grown-up place these days is it?

Apparently, it’s just not fair that Santa is a “he/him”. A man no less! Shock, horror.

Spanish Santa

Ironically, in Spanish, “Santa” (saint) would indicate a female saint. The letter “a” on the end being the most obvious indicator that a word is feminine. A male saint would be “San”. Perhaps one of the more famous examples being San Sebastian – also the name of a well-known Spanish northern city.

It brings me nicely onto a subject that that has been bubbling under the surface for a while now in parts of Spain.

Las/Los…os/as…Nothing is off limits

Some local councils and even some national political parties have taken to printing leaflets and booklets in a gender-less manner. Here is a typical example:

They will now often write things like “…a todos/as…” which means ‘to all’ – both masculine and feminine.

In normal (official, grammatically correct) Spanish, if all the people in a group are female then todas is used. If all are male or it is mixed-company then todos is the correct word. It is just the way it is. (Note the use of the letters “a” and “o”.). This is always the case. In other words the masculine form is the one that takes precedent. Clearly some feminists and their allies (many of whom could be male) cannot deal with the evolution of a language. They are trying to redefine language. It begs the question: What will they want next? Will they insist that all nouns are made gender free – or neuter? So, in Spanish the feminine and masculine definite articles “La” and “El” would be replaced by some new neuter format? Do not be surprised if these crazies try to have the whole language changed to suit this agenda. I am unlikely to see it but my son may well have to live through that battle.

Maybe if this is to happen it will happen first to the German language where they already have masculine, feminine and neuter words in “der, die und das”. Will they drop the der and die and use the neuter “das” for everything? We shall see…. They do say that languages are constantly evolving anyway. So why should this matter? I suppose it is not a big deal in that respect, but this is not a natural evolution is it? It is more like an imposed agenda. The point is that these people are spending (wasting?) tax-payer’s money on this stuff.

Calling “it” how it is?

Now in English – unlike most other languages -we don’t really have that masculine/feminine word thing. It always came as a bit of a shock when we started trying to learn foreign languages in school. (Usually French and German back in my day.)

But the English language does have something that the Spanish language doesn’t really have (or at least not directly) we do have a neutral form of addressing things – usually objects but also animals – as “it”.

Insult or not?

It used to be an insult – sexist even – to refer to a girl or woman as an “it”. Yet now, surely, you couldn’t possibly be accused of being sexist for calling a woman “it” rather than “she” or “her”. Totally crazy when you think how in recent years it has been so easy to brand men as “sexist” for (at times) saying the slightest thing against or about a woman. How things can change so quickly. The next time a woman has a go at me I will simply tell it to go away!