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For a gender ban: The Hamburg CDU state chairman Christoph Ploß
Photo: Markus Scholz / picture alliance / dpa
Recently, my son, tired of corona, showed me a video from a festival.
"Oh, were you in the mosh pit too?" I want to know from him.
"How do you know what a mosh pit is?" He asks me, aghast.
Then the little Swiss person from the Ricola advertisement answers me and asks: "Who invented it?" This is followed by an excursion into my youth and the first punk and death metal concerts.
For pedagogical reasons, I ignore the associated excesses.
"Do you know that you can just say the word 'cool' because of us?" I want to know from my son instead.
He looks like a car.
“It came up in the 1980s,” I tell him, “suddenly everyone said it. Everyone under 25: great music, great party, great weather. Everything was suddenly great overnight. The utterance of this word had an incredible effect on the elderly. At that time it still had a very indecent meaning for them, they felt embarrassingly provoked by it, as if one were saying "fuck" a thousand times in a row nowadays. Well, that is now also possible. But back then we weren't allowed to say 'cool' at school. My French teacher threw me out of class because of this and gave me the order to finally have the holes mended in my jeans. "
My son is stunned.
He buys torn jeans in the store, and he knows the word "cool" most of all from a commercial with an old man who thinks everything is "super cool".
Maybe we are too attached to nouns?
Language is constantly changing. The youth is a catalyst for this. In this way, gendering in the spoken word could also become fully established - if only the available linguistic variants in the articulation weren't so cumbersome. The glottic beat in asterisk or colon words is also hard to get over my lips. I studied English at the same time, but older brains can no longer get used to it so quickly. Especially people of my age cohort, i.e. the boomers - and, yes, exactly, the boomers, find it difficult to pronounce the xx: inside in such a way that men do not feel disadvantaged. Maybe there are too many different variants? The main reason that gendering strikes me as so difficult is because it has not yet really established itself in the spoken language.Just like the international artificial language Esperanto, the gender-neutral formulations lack the breath of life, a certain grown matter of course.
That is why we now need the support of the CDU.
I have a red-hot suggestion for the election manifesto that the party wants to publish for the upcoming federal election on June 21: Please, dear CDU members, forbid gendering!
You make it so exciting, all the other parties have already published their programs.
Take up the suggestion of your Hamburg state chairman!
Maybe you will get rid of the competition from the AfD, just overtake it on the right?
Everyone will be talking about a gender ban.
You don't care about the votes of women anyway, which everyone can see in the women's quota of your CDU parliamentary group: a ridiculous 20.7%, in the ranking right after the AfD.
Perhaps the Vatican will then send visitors to support the CDU who are desperately trying to defend 5,000 years of patriarchy.
“Nobody expected the Gender Inquisition!” Awesome film scene, I can already see it in front of me.
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This is where youth and their innate aversion to the reactionary come into play. (That's still the case, isn't it?) My plan: Around five to ten Youtubers, under Rezo's leadership, should bring about the linguistic change - what the CDU forbids cannot be entirely bad. It is long overdue for equality to find its way into language, but more than 50 years of speech training with the generic masculine have burned into my brain as well. I need a youthful movement that mixes it all up at times. That teaches me a new language.
I just hope the young people will agree on a single, easy-to-articulate version of gendering. It shouldn't come out like the video formats Betamax and VHS in the eighties: Betamax was qualitatively better, but VHS cheaper. In terms of language, we now have to pay attention to quality.
Maybe we are too attached to nouns? You could neutralize the articles, then it would also be easier for people who want to learn the German language. I propose a gender neutral article instead of the / die / das. We could make it (the article, again a guy) from an
M
ischung of sex chromosomes. The formula:
M
+ x + y = myx
Myx engineers, myx educators and myx bakers. This is easy to learn in pronunciation. Sounds like a "hiccup" and is done faster than "engineers, educators and bakers". "At the bakery" would then mean "myxem baker".
Okay, not that great either. Maybe the young people have a better idea after all?
