There will be no question here of the famous spaghetti western of the 1970s or of the facetious response that Ulysses gives to the Cyclops whom he and his companions have just escaped and who wants to know the name of the one who blinded him. We will rather deal with the use of the noun “person” which has become widespread for some time in this contemporary Newspeak which claims to be inclusive: “student person”, “teaching person”, “employee person”, etc.
Just a few months ago, inclusive writing consisted of making women “visible” in a language that supposedly “invisibilized” them, by using, and often overusing, full or truncated doublets and midpoints. A few months later, the same inclusiveness now demands that women and doublets step aside so as not to offend those who consider themselves non-binary.
So-called inclusive writing is thus revealed for what it is: an endless operation of deconstruction of language which has little to do with feminism, at the same time as an illusory fantasy which, like ‘ouroboros of mythology, bites his own tail.
Indeed, we already had a neuter in French, namely the generic masculine, which made it possible to designate mixed groups and could just as easily be used to designate non-binary individuals. We wanted to eliminate it by systematizing the mention of gender in statements thus made binary (“students”). Then we again feel the need for a neutral formulation to respond to the demands of those who do not feel represented by either gender. Hence this new neutral: “person”, which is essential in the name of inclusiveness.
A (false) neutral
However, these new formulations constitute a (false) neutral which does not work; an example is enough to show it. Let’s imagine that we describe the staff of our health establishments and the people who use them. To appear inclusive, we will have to speak of “nurses”, “radiology technicians”, “beneficiary attendants”, etc., at the cost of the repetitive and unsightly nature of all our statements. But what will we name the doctors and their patients? “Patient people” (which, moreover, would appear perfectly justified for all those who frequent emergency rooms) and “medicine people”?
Have fun abusing the term “person” in this way and you’ll quickly realize, even if you’re a staunch believer in inclusive writing, that it just doesn’t work. This is what leads us to believe that this epidemic of “people” will not last and is only a linguistic trinket, the way that the administrators of certain organizations have found to launch “virtuous reports” at all costs, of which the function is mainly advertising and frequently not devoid of clientelist ulterior motives. But in the meantime, it is obviously the common language that suffers.
If these new lexical innovations do not work, it is because they are modeled on English, a language in which new nouns are frequently constructed from two already existing nouns: chairman, boyfriend, bedroom, etc. It is a process which is typical of Germanic languages and which made it possible to invent the inclusive neologism chairperson. Such a process also exists in French, but it is relatively rare: cauliflower, sapeur-pompier, catfish, etc. It is this morphological difference between the two languages which explains why these new names sound strange to the ear of a French speaker.
Thus, “person medicine” is immediately perceived as non-compliant in French, because one would expect to see an adjective following the noun. This is also why “nurse” or “student” appear, at first glance, less shocking since “nurse” and “student” can be adjectives.
The difference between these two cases is, however, misleading; the adjectives “nurse” and “student” in fact mean: “relating to nurses and the care provided by them” and “relating to students”. It is therefore consistent with their meaning to speak of “nursing” or “student union”, but it is not to invent expressions such as “nurse” or “student person”. The same reason explains why “patient person” and “firefighter person” are also not acceptable, the adjectives “patient” and “firefighter” not having the meaning of the nouns to which they seem to correspond.
In short, this inclusive newspeak has the main effect of dispossessing French speakers of their language, of making them lose its deep logic. We have now become “people” – unless we must henceforth say personsor perhaps nobody —, in the etymological sense of the term (personait is the mask of the ancient actor through which the sound passes): we think we are speaking French, but it is the turns of another language that come out of our mouths.
This inclusive French is therefore a bit like a spaghetti western which only has a Franco-Italian scriptwriter and its producers, while it is filmed in English, with mainly American actors and which it takes, in outrageous to the point of caricature, all the codes of the western made in USA. To Sergio Leone’s film, we may prefer The Odyssey : Ulysses ends up proudly confessing his true identity to the Cyclops, even if it means having to assume the consequences implied by this revelation of the truth.