Latino was enthusiastically taken up as an alternative to Hispanic around the same time African American came into use; the newer term solved the problem created by the fact that Hispanic, which centers language, refers to Spanish-speakers and thus excludes people of Brazilian descent. Latinx, too, purports to solve a problem: that of implied gender. True, gender marking in language can affect thought. But that issue is largely discussed among the intelligentsia. If you ask the proverbial person on the street, you’ll find no gnawing concern about the bias encoded in gendered word endings.

To black people, African American felt like a response to discrimination from outsiders, something black people needed as an alternative to the loaded word black. The term serves as a proud statement to a racist society. To Latinos, Latinx may feel like an imposition by activists. It’s also too clever by half for Romance-language speakers accustomed to gendered nouns. (It bears mentioning, however, that African American never displaced black, and has always been treated as a somewhat formal term. “Say it out loud: I’m African American and I’m proud”—nah. These days, some younger people are advocating a return to black.)

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The difference between African American and Latinx represents a pattern demonstrated endlessly in the past. Blackboard-grammar rules—fewer books rather than less books, when to use that instead of which, etc.—are imposed from on high. Few have actually transcended the status of grammar-pusses’ hobbyhorse and penetrated the way most English speakers at least try to speak and write. For example, the idea that one should use subject pronouns after and—Billy and I went to the store rather than Billy and me went to the store—has a fragile reign at best. Most people break the rule ceaselessly in casual conversation, and many of those who think they don’t nevertheless say between you and I, which actually breaks the rule they are trying to observe, because I is not a subject in that phrase. The fact is that rendering pronouns as subjects after and when they come before verbs is a tic inculcated through schooling and shaming. There is a reason we can master intricate tasks like piano playing, card playing, and computer gaming more thoroughly than between you and me: They are us; they delight us from below, as it were.

Schoolmarms don’t make language. For all the fulminations about the singular they, for instance, English speakers have used it liberally for centuries, from Middle English on. It is quite ordinary for languages to have gender-neutral pronouns, and English-speakers felt natural recruiting they to serve that purpose. The idea that something that felt so ordinary was “wrong” was an imposition from on high that had little effect beyond what copy editors could get their pens on. Some used he/she; others laboriously alternated between he and she; but in speech especially, just as many relaxed and used they, and the world kept spinning.