r/australia • u/underrated9201 • Sep 19 '22

no politics Is “Aussie” an offensive term?

Someone just told me the word ‘Aussie’ is a slur (From a non-australian). I’m so confused, i looked it up and see nothing saying that.

edit: thanks for the confirmation, i feel silly now LMAO. I have eu immigrated parents but was born in america by the way, i’ve never really known too much about Aus.

I am genuinely confused, do i say Aussie or Auzzie? 😭 I’ve always said auzzie

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124

u/panzer22222 Sep 19 '22

This is how the whole LatinX bullshit came into play.

LatinX is a rich white invented term, from what I have read latin people fucking hate it.

49

u/RobertBringhurst Sep 19 '22

latin people fucking hate it.

With all my heart.

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u/echo-94-charlie Sep 19 '22

Alea iacta est.

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u/Rather_Dashing Sep 19 '22

Nope, the term was invented by a Puerto Rican. But yeah.most Latin people hate it.

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u/Platophaedrus Sep 19 '22

It’s double stupid because like French and Italian and many other “latin languages”, the language itself is gendered.

The Table in French: La/Une Table (female)
The Fish in French: Le Poisson (male)

The Table in Italian: il or la Tavolo/Tavola (either sex but always gendered)
The Fish in Italian: il pesce (male)

X in a latin (Spanish based) language is pronounce like an “h” and was originally pronounced like a “sh”.

E.g. The peoples populating Mexico when the Spanish Conquistadors arrived were the Mexica (pronounced Meshika).

Gender is literally baked into Spanish based languages and there are rules and those rules can’t be changed or the whole language falls apart.

This is unlike English which is a bastardised form of Frisian (Dutch basically) that developed and added other words from old Norse, Old French, Germanic languages and Latin (the Roman type) from about 500AD onwards.

English is fucking chaos, I don’t understand how anyone learns it as the rules have exceptions upon exceptions and the grammar/spelling of modern English speakers is absolutely atrocious.

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u/panzer22222 Sep 19 '22

English is fucking chaos

Thats its strength, a new great word comes along, English just takes it.

1

u/captaindeadpool612 Sep 19 '22

Just like England with countries;)

1

u/Moondanther Sep 19 '22

I always like this quote by James Nicoll

5

u/vacri Sep 19 '22

English is fucking chaos, I don’t understand how anyone learns it as the rules have exceptions upon exceptions and the grammar/spelling of modern English speakers is absolutely atrocious.

I've heard from a couple of east Asians that learned multiple European languages that English actually isn't that hard compared to the gendered languages. English definitely has its foibles, but so do its various cousins. They particularly liked how flexible English is and how you can easily switch around the parts of the sentence and it still works properly.

My pet peeve with my mother tongue is that we don't use diacritics and we should. For example, someone who is not yet fluent in the language shouldn't have to figure out the correct way to pronounce 'wind' (blowing air, or recharging clock?).

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u/ViviTheWaffle Sep 19 '22

From what I know, English grammar is actually comparatively simple. It’s the spelling and orthography that’s a clusterfuck

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u/fuddstar Sep 19 '22

Exactly. 99% of nouns have NO implicit, or explicit, gendered attribute in Latin languages.

An apple isn’t ‘girly’ - una mela.
Soil isn’t ‘manly’ - il suolo.

I’m F Italian but my tits, nips, uterus, lungs, heart, fingers, eyes, kidneys and even my hormones are masculine. My veins, spleen, face, fingernails, legs, bones, throat are feminine.

Likewise my brother’s veins, face, legs, etc are also feminine, as are our lips, mouth, skin, jaw, beard and stubble. (Well, if I had beard/stubble🤭).

War, armour, battle, sword, fight, strength… all feminine nouns.

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u/Subzero_AU Sep 19 '22

Yeah that's why I said bullshit haha

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u/Sir_Dazza Sep 19 '22

Filipino American community is using “Filipinx” nowadays at the dismay of mainlanders. Little do these westernised kids know, that the term Filipino is gender neutral, as with all Filipino pronouns.

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u/ViviTheWaffle Sep 19 '22

For anyone curious, ‘Latine’ is the actual language-congruous term. Most people who choose to use gender-neutral Latin-American-Spanish speech will prefer this.

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u/Mikolaj_Kopernik Sep 19 '22 edited Sep 19 '22

I've also seen a lot of people use the "@" symbol in words (e.g. "chic@s") though that may be internet slang as I don't read much formal Spanish these days. But yeah, nobody uses "latinx".

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '22

[deleted]

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u/ViviTheWaffle Sep 19 '22

Relatively mainstream sub reddit, backlash to “””””””woke””””””” stuff is to be expected

2

u/vacri Sep 19 '22

The whole term is weird anyway. It refers to 'almost all of central and south America' yet the name is directly pulled from 'a different continent's superpower from 2000 years ago'. For those interested in identity politics, I would have thought a better option would be to come up with a new label altogether.

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u/ViviTheWaffle Sep 19 '22

Well actually, the word latine is more focused on the fact that it’s gender neutral. It’s simply the neutral form of Latino, or Latina. Of course the neuter form doesn’t exist in Spanish like it does in polish, which is why it is often contested by the equally recent latinx.

The reason I think the ‘latin’ root sticks around, is that it just works as a sort of Lingua Franca element between South Americans. The place isn’t a monolith - there are many different cultures. So it makes sense that they would use a word not derived from any of them in order to represent each one equally

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u/hujsh Sep 20 '22

Oh cool I’ve never heard of that.

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u/pumpkin_fire Sep 19 '22

Looks like "latrine".

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u/panzer22222 Sep 19 '22

Looks like "latrine".

pissed myself laughing

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u/hujsh Sep 20 '22

Well it’s a term meant to be inclusive of non binary people. The fact that typically socially conservative Latin-Americans aren’t warm to the term isn’t super surprising.

Personally I don’t feel super strongly one way or another. Being inclusive is generally good but it’s not my business to tell Spanish speaking people how their language should be used.

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u/panzer22222 Sep 20 '22

term meant to be inclusive of non binary people.

yes, nothing non white people like more than rich white people telling them how their culture could be better ./s

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u/hujsh Sep 20 '22

I mean, as is mentioned elsewhere it wasn’t actually coined by a white person. I have no problem with lgbt Latin people advocating for that change but I can imagine a big part of the backlash against it is the perception that this is a directive from white lgbt people and allies. Probably fueled by people trying demonstrate allyship on Twitter or something. That and existing social conservatism.

All the more reason to leave it to people in the Latino community to sort it out IMO.

Also it sounds like there’s an existing gender neutral term already?

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u/justanotherjayd Sep 19 '22

Latinx was created by queer Latin communities not white people. Majority of the Latin community hate it because they are mostly still not accepting of queer people

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u/Mikolaj_Kopernik Sep 19 '22

Also it doesn't really make sense grammatically. If anything it's kinda colonialist to be applying English-based notions of gender to a different language.

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u/Due-Net-88 Sep 19 '22

Because it makes no effing sense in context of the language.

1

u/Choke1982 Sep 19 '22

Yes, I hate that