It’s Wednesday, the day of confessions according to the Uzbek horoscope, so I’m diving… I’ve just gotten used to the word “author”.
At the beginning, my tongue tripped over “author”, it meant “author”.
Then I got used to it. It’s like the name Horace: I have a friend who gave her child an old name (not Horace, but in the same waters). Every time his first name percolated on the surface of things, I thought of a poet born before Christ or an obscure Quebec minister of the 19th century.e century…
In the old days, to describe someone particularly stupid, I used the word “Mongolian”. It didn’t please everyone and it occasionally earned me tomatoes from angry readers. But I really liked “Mongolian”: any Quebecer born before 1990 understands this expression.
Then, one day, a lady sent me a photo of her teenage son with Down syndrome and a grocery clerk, looking gorgeous in his IGA – or maybe it was Metro – suit, telling me how he got up every morning proud to go and pack the order (I know, I know, it’s not said anymore) from customers…
“Do you know what makes him sad, M. Lagacé? When people refer to him as a Mongol…”
I never used “Mongolian” again.
I am old enough to remember that “crippled” fell into disuse: the word “handicapped” gradually imposed itself.
But after a few years, activists stood up and called “disabled” grumbling: Yes, but the handicapped is not only handicapped, you know, it is first and foremost a person!
The expression “disabled person” has therefore become part of the language. I am reluctant to use it and I have been criticized for it. I think disabled does the job very well. Not to mention that most of my readership is not full-time idiots: they know that the “disabled” are “people”.
I thought that we had reached, with “disabled person”, at the end of the lexicon to designate people who are in wheelchairs, who move with a cane or who have lost an index finger…
Except that no: I am now criticized for not using “person living with a disability”!
At the perilous risk of passing for an ugly columnist in his fifties unaware of his white privileges born into a family where no one had reached CEGEP, I must tell you that “person living with a disability”, or even “person living in roaming”, you will never read that here.
For what ?
Because I write newspaper columns, not Ministry of Inclusion forms. My refusal does not come from a spirit of contradiction. It depends on two things.
One, I want to be read1. Anything that weighs down my prose undermines that goal.
(If I’m not read, the bosses will take this column away from me and it still worries me a little, because I have a child to feed. Do you know that a 17-year-old boy eats tabarslak? )
Two, I have a word limit here. The closer I get to 1,000 words, the more the boss’s gaze darkens.
So I will never write the students because it weighs down the text, no more than firefighters because there are very, very few firefighters. But I still write the nurses because there are many more nurses than male nurses.
I have nothing against inclusive writing or epicene writing2. But I think that sometimes we touch on the absurd when we make a religion of it which weighs down the prose.
Look at Stanford University which covered itself in ridicule3 by laying out a list of words to avoid on campus, the title of which sounded like a cultural re-education initiative spearheaded by the Chinese Communist Party: The Toxic Language Elimination Initiative.
It was suggested, for example, to ban the words “chief”, “guru”, “tribe”, “Americans”, “black list” and even “she”…
See Marianne who quoted in January4 an “inclusive” letter from the town hall of Paris: “ You will receive a visit from a census taker recruited by the town hall of your district and provided with an official card for this purpose. » Further : “When the enumerator comes to your home, he/she will ask you to respond electronically. »
Let’s say the reviewer agent, period, we will understand that the feminine includes the masculine, long live the evolution. But these dots that traditionally indicate the end of a sentence that we plant in the middle of a word, I just see a wart, sorry.
And it’s quite ironic when we know that Anne Hidalgo calls herself “mayor of Paris” and not “mayor of Paris”.
I understand that it is necessary to raise awareness. But can we stop thinking that everyone is that bad sensible ?
In a similar vein, let’s talk about “people with penises,” a term that’s starting to pop up here and there. I understand gender fluidity very well, but since the vast majority of people who have penises are men, I’m going to write “men”, and people with a penis who don’t define themselves as “man” will, hopefully get over it…
Or choose not to read me.
And I won’t write either (the request will come, that’s for sure) “no one vivant with a penis” or – don’t even try – “penis in person”5.
And if a person insists that I use iel by designating them, go, no problem. If Stéphane wearing beard and mustache tells me to identify as a woman, same thing: Stéphane will be “her” in this column.
Yes, boss, I stretched: 960 words.
SorryI will (maybe) write shorter on Saturday.
1. Hence the title, ladies and gentlemen
5. This one comes to us from Yves Boisvert, I want to clarify.