[by Jean Szlamowicz]

Text originally published in long version in the journal Text! under the title “Inclusivism is a fundamentalism”

Inclusive writing starts with a good intention.

Or rather, it starts from a rather imprecise intention that does not ask any of the good questions inherent in its reformist approach: if it is a question of valuing women in society, why language? why just writing and not speaking? what concrete effects can be expected from it? what exactly is it a question of rectifying? how to interpret grammar? what about all the other grammatical phenomena?

Such a desire for language regeneration is not new and its naive impulse could possess the poetic charm of an attention to the nuances of language. In this respect, it is part of the more or less fanciful linguistic quests that Umberto Eco described in The search for the perfect language.

The utopia of improving language is truly fantastical and refers in history only to aesthetic, mystical, totalitarian, or at best sterile attempts (volapük and esperanto). Many linguists have therefore decided to shrug their shoulders and not worry about it. However, this linguistic fad - to eliminate the supposed sexism inherent in linguistic practices - has become a doctrine that can now be called "inclusivism" and which wants to impose itself in the world of knowledge, including through defamation and lies, entryism and scientific revisionism.

This sudden transformation—in the space of five years—of course raises a fundamental political-cognitive question: did the common language that activists used just a few months ago not prevent them from thinking about feminism properly? Or were they unknowingly sexist when they said “the candidate” and not “the candidate” and did they receive the revelation as an epiphany that provoked their conversion? Do they now have to atone for having dared to write “all” instead of “all and all” all their lives? Have the linguistic theories that they practiced just five years ago suddenly become obsolete? And are speakers and linguists who have not changed their theoretical frameworks or their oral and scriptural practices bastards?

In any case, some linguists have gone so far as to transform their interpretation of linguistic facts to consider that go to the hairdresser is a sexist expression with regard to go to the whores : the culprit would be the preposition in which would show respect for the hairdresser and while to would be contemptuous of the streetwalkers.[1] To impose such a delusional projection, this implies - in addition to a profound bad faith - a complete overhaul of the standards of interpretation of the language. This illustrates well that the various postulates, more or less implicit, which found linguistic inclusivism are in truth antiscientific - and the supporters of this doctrine stubbornly refuse to respond on this ground.

tongue anatomy

The inclusivist error, fond of injustices to denounce, starts from the principle that everything is patriarchy and that everything must be "deconstructed". Language would therefore be sexist and would favor an "androcentric" vision of the world. Let us immediately refute this proposition making grammar the foundation of social organization: if we were to literally apply this idea that language expresses a vision of society, then speakers of genderless languages ​​would be blind to sexual difference... We would then have to think that Armenian, Basque, Cantonese, Comanche, Finnish, Georgian, Igbo, Persian, Khmer, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yoruba speakers share a conception of gender that would not succeed in distinguishing men from women!

If a discourse can be sexist, language as a structure is only what the speakers make of it: Olympe de Gouges can be a feminist in French as Tariq Ramadan cannot be even though he uses the same language. Would Ramadan become a feminist if he expressed his ideas in inclusive writing? Why then want to change the structures of the language that suited Simone de Beauvoir or Simone Veil so well?

The paradox is that the knowledge established in language sciences — but radically revised by inclusivists over the last ten years — demonstrates that we cannot take a shortcut that makes language an ideological framework that would condition individuals. To postulate the opposite is to propose a psychology of peoples classifying grammars according to the ideology that we would attribute to speakers: there would thus be primitive languages ​​/ peoples, evolved languages ​​/ peoples, etc. It is a form of ethnographic racism that has long since been put aside as outdated ideas.

That there is a domain of psychic and social life devoid of inequality should be welcomed with relief by these activists. However, this is a tipping point of their bad faith (or their ignorance): to justify their activism, it is necessary - at all costs - that the language be sexist.

Tongue pulled out by the hair

The interpretative forcing is obvious among these activists who make aberrant proposals. In a recent inclusivist work,[2] it is considered that "go to the hairdresser" would be sexist because it discriminates against the expression "go to the whores" because the preposition to would show disrespect... The argument continues by recommending, out of egalitarianism, to say henceforth go to the hairdresser :

"When we want a haircut, we no longer go to the hairdresser's. Why then want to preserve the archaic use of "at" followed by a job title? [...] Why then continue to advocate "at the hairdresser's"? Maintaining this archaic usage is above all an abuse of language. Its only use is symbolic and social: to show or not respect the person designated ("at the hairdresser's"; "at the whores") or to distinguish oneself as a speaker. Where linguistic logic would like us to favor the use of "at" to designate only homes, the social logic of the search for distinction, even when it is based on a completely arbitrary rule linguistically, has blocked this trend and invented an exception."

We could be satisfied with the quote, so patent is the absurdity. Let us nevertheless unravel a little these remarks whose paralogism calls for a systematic destruction. It is impossible, moreover, to count all the approximations: the use of at the hairdresser is not at all archaic; there is no "linguistic logic" that pre-exists usage (it's the opposite: we study usage to observe, precisely, a logic); there is no exaltation of social superiority in this usage which is one of the most common, etc.

Let us look methodically at the flaws in the demonstration. First, go to the hairdresser et go to the whores are not statements but expressions: they are quoted here without any real context: we will therefore not be able to study their discursive intention. This would not normally be a flaw if the authors' argument did not presume a particular intention. This intention ("to show respect") is not demonstrated and goes against the intuition of any speaker: in what way I don't want to go to that other asshole's house would he show respect?

It is also perfectly laughable to see in paraphrased in the text of these authors as meaning "at the home of". As any speaker intuitively knows, in can be followed by a number of complements unrelated to a dwelling:

Things aren't going very well at their place. (whether it is a business, a couple, a party, etc.).

Among academics, there is a tendency towards activism.

In Jankélévitch, depth of thought meets elegance of style.

The preposition in actually comes from property, "house" in Latin. This is an example of what is called grammaticalization in linguistics, that is, the loss of the denotative function in favor of syntactic functions. However, the necessity remains that the noun must refer to a person: * At SNCF, catering prices are scandalous does not really work. On the other hand - and this proves that it is not a question of denotation but of collocation - we can refer to it with chez and a collective pronoun:

– At the SNCF, catering is expensive…

– Yeah, their prices are too high.

Lexical heritage, we will therefore find in preferably to refer to a person or at least to a proper name ("At Casto, there is everything you need!"; "Will your electricity soon be cheaper at Leclerc?") or a pronoun (at their home).

Questions of method

In their caricatured statement, the authors neglect the actual existence of jobs: at the hairdresser actually exists alongside “at the hairdresser” but not with the same nuances. We will thus find statements like:

Well, while you're cleaning, I'll go to the grocery store, the butcher, the hairdresser and then the gas station..

Such a statement is part of the most common spoken language—even if it seems incongruous in writing. Prescriptivism probably envisages à as faulty in these cases, but the spontaneous oral corpora show that these forms exist. We therefore note that go to et aller à tend to be distinguished according to whether the complement is considered as an activity (going to the hairdresser bores me) or as a place (I go to the supermarket first, and then to the hairdresser). This is what we discover if we choose to do linguistics and avoid both academic normativity and militant normativity. We thus note that there are different forms in writing and speaking, that there are language registers, that certain forms are more or less common, that forms have distinct values, that collocations lead to a variable acceptability of forms, etc.

Another flaw in the inclusivist demonstration is that the authors operate in a totally arbitrary manner a connection between completely unrelated expressions. They completely neglect the descriptive approach to jump on the prescription without studying the expression. aller à which does not have the same meaning depending on the complement. Indeed, the reason for the move can focus on a place: (go to london) or an activity (go mushroom picking, winter sports, whores), or even develop intentional profiling such as go to contact, or aspectual, such as go to disaster. There is no mention that singular and plural are not interchangeable (*go to the whore), what in refers to the existence of a commercial premises, etc.

Let us also remember that the denotative meaning of words is not fixed by the lexicon: go to church does not have the same meaning in "he is very pious, he goes to church every Sunday" and in "for my jogging, I go to church, I pass by the cemetery and I go around the lake": in one case, go to church designates a practice of religious observance, in the other case a journey where église denotes a building.

Another oversight in this inclusive prescriptive frenzy: the very meaning of the phrase at the hairdresser. Indeed, besides the fact that this profession can often have as its incarnation a hairdresser, it is not actually a person but a business. In this respect, we must even consider, semantically, that the word hairdresser does not designate a person, but a routine scenario which refers extralinguistically to a multitude of individuals (the person at reception, the person who washes hair, the person who cuts it, etc.).

Fact, aller at the hairdresser belongs to a paradigm which is that of go to + merchant. In these alternations, the constraint is not denotative but semantic-formal: in is rather followed by a person, while à is followed by a location: go to the butcher vs go to the butcher's; go to the garage vs aller in the garage. We do not see the slightest sexual or social problem here.

By the way, by what view of the mind do the authors imagine that the continuum of meaning property / in / house can only refer to a residential dwelling? A commercial establishment is also called a house :

Mariage Frères, tea house

Aubercy is a very beautiful Parisian house

This is a decent house here!

Prescription, rules, uses

In the texts of Candéa and Véron, the utopian prescriptivism of deciding on the social judgment linked to usage instead of usage is irrelevant. An archaism being a form that is no longer used, how can one consider as archaic what is common? In a rather illogical manner, the authors proclaim "Can one cite a grammatical rule that justifies this?" at the same time as they attack precisely the rule that, after aller, the name of the profession is introduced by the preposition in. This is precisely the rule they oppose. But what do they mean by "rule"? They confuse, intentionally or not, the different meanings of the word. rule : "grammar rule" can designate the prescriptive formulation of certain uses in teaching and "grammar rule" can have a strictly descriptive value and designate a judgment of grammaticality ("in French, we cannot have a personal subject pronoun of a non-tense verb form like I sleep "). Of course, rule also has a connotation of authority that is legal. It is an antanaclasis to use rule in both cases without distinguishing them.

As we have seen, go + to + job is a common form, probably much more so than go + to + job, and is therefore prescribed for its sociolinguistic value considered preferential, which is prescriptive but also based on usage. There is an interaction between usage and prescription, which basically defines what we call the norm. Not differentiating between norm, usage, fault, correctness, social value and grammaticality results in a hodgepodge of reasoning. We cannot prescribe a usage ("we must say go to the hairdresser ”) and stand against the prescription of another by invoking the connotative power of the word rule. The same goes for the word grammar, happily used by confusing its different uses: grammar in the academic sense, that is to say institutional pedagogical practices and grammar in the linguistic sense which designates the structural functioning of a language.

Moreover, the "feminist" prism is completely ineffective in explaining the value of prepositions. It is lexical axiology that is relevant: if there is pejoration, it is obviously in the word turkey and not in the preposition to ! And again, like all familiar, coarse or filthy words, turkey is also an indicator of register and does not necessarily have a negative judgment value. Is there less social judgment in prostitute that in turkey ? The interaction of register, semantics, context and argumentation decides the value of the statement. In short — analytical banality — it all depends on what we want to say… We must therefore reason in relation to the discourse and not in relation to dictionary abstractions.

Even so, the multitude of expressions with go + to show that go to the whores is actually perfectly regular. Indeed, this expression also exists with nouns that do not refer to a place or a business (unlike aller at the hairdresser) but to an activity embodied by various objects. Go to the whores therefore belongs to the same paradigm as:

Go for mushrooms (strawberries, asparagus, blueberries, etc.)

Go to winter sports

Go to the fields

Go to news

Go to photocopies,

Go to the provisions

Go to the flea market

Jump to views (ie cinema, in Quebec French)

What are whores doing in this?

The comparison between hairdresser et whores constitutes a selective rapprochement coming from a perfectly arbitrary bias. What could possibly be the link between two expressions in a language? How can one explain an expression by looking for another that has little in common? In short, what do whores have to do with it?

Further absurdity, the ideological postulate of these remarks that fail so catastrophically to establish a link between grammar and society consists in arguing that semantic-grammatical pejoration weighs on women to the benefit of men. Is it really necessary to point out to them that, in fact, hairdresser is a radically feminized profession?…

At the root of this jumble of sterile analyses, the authors evoke the notion of "social utility", which is as pompous as it is incredibly vague and without tangible reality. By what madness can we imagine that when a speaker says he goes to the hairdresser, it is to humiliate prostitutes with prepositions?

Clearly, the advanced state of cretinism of such virtuous grandiloquence constitutes an offense against the university, science and common sense. So it is to analyses of this level that we would rely to reform the language on a moral basis? We would still have to be capable of an objective description to propose rules!

[1] French is ours! A short manual of linguistic emancipation, Candea & Véron, The Discovery, 2019

[2] French is ours! A short manual of linguistic emancipation, Candea & Véron, La Découverte, 2019 and https://theconversation.com/aller-chez-le-coiffeur-mais-aller-aux-putes-ce-que-revele-lusage-des-prépositions-114557