Steve makes short work of the ridiculous “Latinx,” but also needing attention is the more common “Latino.” The term derives from the region of Latium in central Italy but it was never applied to the Italian-born Angelo Codevilla (The Ruling Class) or people such as Frank Sinatra, Madonna, Antonin Scalia and many others. “Latino” is applied to people with ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe, so they are more accurately called “Iberians,” or “Hispanics,” a linguistic term that has nothing to do with race.
People with ancestry in Scotland, England, and such are tagged as “Caucasians,” which makes no sense. Caucasians are from the actual Caucuses region, more than 5,000 miles from North America. The term recalls an episode in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.
Megalopolitan Studios has given the boot to Sir Francis Hinsley, who duly commits suicide. Whispering Glades, the exclusive funeral home, wants to know if Hinsley was a Caucasian. British poet Dennis Barlow confirms that Sir Francis was “purely English.” Dennis composes an elegy for his departed countryman:
They told me, Francis Hinsley, they told me you were hung
With red protruding eye-balls and black protruding tongue;
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had laughed about Los Angeles and now ’tis here you’ll lie;
Here pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore,
Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost nor gone before.
Waugh would have had great fun with “Latinix.” He was born in 1903, same year as Malcolm Muggeridge (Chronicles of Wasted Time) and George Orwell (1984), who was already on to “Newspeak.” Hard to find a dull page from these writers, so have at it. As C.S. Lewis said, “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”
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