It was probably inevitable the French would fiercely resist the slide into pronoun wokeism — or wokisme, as they call it, across the Channel. After all, not only are the French fiercely protective of their language, but the whole nonsense of “gender theory” is an academic lunacy dreamt up in that most gauche of places, America. Of course, the France is no stranger itself to academic idiocy: it’s the home, after all, of silver-tongued frauds like Derrida, Lacan and Foucault.
Still, while France may have lost its battle to keep out Disney, it’s fighting back against wokisme.
The furor provoked by a prominent dictionary’s inclusion of the pronoun “iel” has been remarkably virulent.French dictionary publisher Le Petit Robert, rivalled only by the Larousse in linguistic authority, chose to add “iel” — a gender-neutral merging of the masculine “il” (he) and the feminine “elle” (she) — to its latest online edition.
Jean-Michel Blanquer, the education minister, was not amused.
“You must not manipulate the French language, whatever the cause,” he said.
Blanquer points to iel as another feint in the assault of American wokisme on France. Where France prides itself on universalism, it sees wokisme as tearing America apart by fomenting racial and gender enmity. Blanquer is far from the only leading French figure saying “Non” to wokeism.
In this instance, however, he was joined by Brigitte Macron, the first lady. “There are two pronouns: he and she,” she declared. “Our language is beautiful. And two pronouns are appropriate” […]
The Larousse dictionary derided the Robert initiative, dismissing “iel” as a “pseudo pronoun.”
France, it must be remembered, is so protective of its linguistic purity that it has a centuries-old institution dedicated to the purpose: the Académie française, founded in 1634. The Académie has so far rejected a push for so-called “inclusiveness”.
Its secretary-in-perpetuity, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, said that inclusive writing, even if it seemed to bolster a movement against sexist discrimination, “is not only counterproductive for that cause but harmful to the practice and intelligibility of the French language”.
Meanwhile, the proponents of wokisme give the game away:
“To define the words that describe the world is to aid better comprehension of it.”
The Age
As I’ve written several times, when the left realise they’ve lost the argument, their go-to strategy is to re-define the language. Having changed words to mean anything other than what they actually mean, the left then triumphantly declare themselves to be correct all along.
If you’ve ever been called a “fascist” by a thug in a black shirt, or seen some hulking troglodyte in a dress bellow, “It’s Ma’am!”, you’ll know what I mean.
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