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One morning in the late fifties, Salvador Ascencio, a high school student at the Simón Bolívar Institute in Mexico City, was bored with the beautiful things being explained in the physics class. He raised his hand and, with a malicious idea in his head, asked permission to go to the bathroom. Once outside, he waited for his good friend, Billy Aguirre, to understand the real reason why he had left the room: that the two could paint together! Billy did not come out… and did not come out… so Salvador decided to call him not through shouts or whistles ─which would betray him─ but appropriating the last thing he had assimilated from the physics professor’s explication and scribbling on the blackboard: the physical behavior of waves. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on “transmitting a mental wave” to Billy so that he would leave the room. To his surprise, the door opened immediately, framing his friend’s figure, who had just received the invitation mentally. Salvador was convinced that the invocation had worked. Happily, excitedly, he hugged Billy: “You caught the wave!” The two friends shared their excitement.
The phrase coined in that experience was not just for those two. As a type of refrain, it spread among the other kids in the room, who fell like dominoes into using that amusing word wave. After all, being young, they liked to discover the multiple and wonderful meanings they could give to waves and vibrations: people threw out good vibes or bad vibes, you could send the wave to someone you liked, you were in the wave, you had the wave, you caught the wave (you could also be out of the wave or someone could take you out of the wave, of course). Finally, all that jargon became synthesized into a very effective Spanish greeting: “Qué onda?” (“What wave?” = “How’s it going?”)
Falling into that way of speaking, the kids continued their lives, which a few years later included passing some time in the Zona Rosa, a small quadrant of the Juárez neighborhood that had become fashionable among young writers, musicians, and plastic artists. Apparently, the Zone received the Simón Bolivar students affectionately, adopting them like pets because of their fun and contagious enthusiasm … and, of course, that new use of the word “wave” soon stuck among those present, becoming famous and spreading.
The idiom began to sound in other circles throughout the city, not as big then as now. All the uses invented by those kids, plus the ones that its flexibility allowed, made the new expression an icon of the time, to the extent that one day, it began appearing in the highly successful stories and novels of the famous young writer José Agustín and others who at that time innovated by introducing the kids’ daily slang into their texts: they began to be called “Wave Writers.”
Many years later, when this literary movement was already established historically in the writing of Mexico (and when the word “wave” had become a commonly used word in several countries), José Agustín received a visit from the then-mature Salvador Ascencio, who told him how the word that gave name to his famous literary movement had emerged. Intrigued, the writer decided to investigate the story that this strange character had relayed to him and found, indeed, witnesses who had frequented the Zona Rosa at that time confirming that “some kids from Simón Bolívar” had arrived at the time, bringing the new use of the word!
I relate this story as it was told to me almost ten years ago by its protagonist, Salvador himself (sadly now deceased), whom I could contact through his brother Victor, my sister’s lifelong friend. Victor told me he was a child when his brother and friends came home chattering their language without him understanding what they were saying. Apparently, there is a text by José Agustín where he tells the story that Salvador told him, but I have not been able to find it. (Today, the word appears with its sixties meanings in the Royal Dictionary of the Wave… sorry, of the Spanish Language).
For my part, if I dare to refer to this story, it is because I trust my two sources and the fact that things could well have happened as they were told to me and simultaneously, in other ways, superimposing all those intuitions, confluences, and interferences that go into the creation of a language.
This wonderful anecdote deserves an essay or several and possibly proper research. I bring it here for two reasons: I confess that the most important is that I do not want to keep it to myself anymore, and I have been waiting for the pretext to tell it for some time. The second is that this article gives me the perfect pretext because I intend to discuss here how language changes, particularly the so-called gender-inclusive language, which according to the UN, is “the way to express oneself orally and in writing without discriminating against one sex, social gender, or gender identity in particular and without perpetuating gender stereotypes.” A case in point is the proposal to make modifications to Spanish to convert masculine or feminine gender words into neutral gender, for example with the use of e, x or @ and thus replace “alumnos/alumnas” by alumnes, alumnxs or alumn@s.” Or even, the proposal to create a new inclusive vowel ─named “secte”─ designed by the Mexicans Mario García Torres, plastic artist, and Aldo Arillo, typographer (the latter, a graduate and professor at CEDIM The School of Design, Campus Monterrey, Mexico). According to its creators, “secte” would be the sixth vowel of the Spanish alphabet and “could replace the e, the @, or the x, which have been used informally in inclusive language.
To begin, the story of Salvador Ascencio describes amusingly and forcefully something we already know: that language spreads and renews itself like an echo and not as a declaration, i.e., once we integrate the device we call “mother tongue,” new words and grammatical uses can only become grafted contextually through people’s ideal harmony. An explanation for the success of the word “wave” in the sixties and seventies is that its first pronouncers were young people motivated, as always, by signs of identity. Socially, the word was inserted into the language of the influential New Age, which, among other things, tried to give scientific explanations to “spiritual” phenomena, affirming, for example, that “the soul” is an energy expressed in the form of waves.
Today, when discussing changing grammatical rules for inclusivity, the question of whether language should be modified by decree explodes. Does changing a word or grammatical usage depend on our will, or does it surpass all conscious intention? Many believe language is a living organism as complex as any biological reality and does not admit arbitrary implants. Its components are not isolated parts but intimately related so that a change in one affects the entire system, and any attempt to introduce an artificial element runs the risk of undermining the nature of the whole.
I want to be utterly categorical on this point and express my opposition to legislation and the imposition of laws on inclusive language. I also intend to declare my total solidarity with those who rebel against continuing to be named in ways they do not identify. The very weight of language that served me to oppose artificiality now serves me to denounce methods that impose on people a structure that constrains a part of them and their entire person. Also, the fact that language is created and propagated spontaneously does not mean that a discriminatory background cannot be discovered someday.
Regarding inclusive language, I always like to start by alluding to our use of the word man to refer to all of humanity. A majority still do not see anything strange in talking about The History of Man or Modern Man and do not believe that this use excludes women. According to them, we cannot say that reference to “man” excludes women, but even if we agree with them, we should also say that it does not include them either. The word “man” renders the woman invisible; she only appears if she becomes evident; we must remember her to include her, so she exists. (Now I remember the excellent title of a book on the subject: Primitive Man is also a Woman. It was published in Spanish under the title El hombre primitivo es también una mujer.)
However, many of us agree with the proposal to stop talking about “man” in general and always refer, for example, to “man and woman.” However, I am sure the number of adherents would significantly reduce if an enlightened despot imposed that as law. On the one hand, people have every right not to be named by terms with which they do not relate, i.e., to be called in ways they do not desire. Calling someone “man” when this word repels him can cause much unjust suffering. At the same time, however, it is a fact that imposing someone to speak in a way that does not come naturally to them also involves a considerable degree of violence. For many, having to “edit” repeatedly what they say feels enormously aggressive, even if they are “open-minded.”
Should we accept that society is a battlefield, and some must submit in this confrontation? Is it possible to seek a point of conciliation, a solution that does not arise from a unilateral decision? As I have expressed in my other articles, the time has come to talk about the education we want, fantasize that things happen accordingly, and that we find a middle ground. For this, I turn to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the moment in which he created the word dasein to bring to the world of language what, for him and many, was a formidable intuition (the type of Being that is the human being). My idea is that, in finding that name, Heidegger carried out not only an act of designation but something more profound: a baptism. He named something that, for the first time, appeared before him. As we all know, baptizing someone is not a mechanical act, nor is grammar a grammatical act. In elementary school, they present grammar to us as a tool. It belongs to grammar only if we consider it the source from which words flow. Baptism does not change the name of a person who already existed; instead, it names a new person. Precisely, that is what LGBTQI+ people ask us, that we accompany them in a baptism that does not designate them in a superficial, functional way but is transformational from the very bottom of the language.
There must be a constant dialogue between the depth we all yearn for and the law that tends to preserve what exists. For my part, I would like to convince those who do not want to hear about inclusive language that in ignoring it, they are missing out on a whole stretch of their personal humanity. At the same time, I join those who continue to summon the whole of society to this ritual in which human beings give each other their true names.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
In this link, you can find more information about the vowel “secte.”
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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