Language is in the using of it?

lol amazing, this catering website seems to have thrown up their hands on a gender neutral plural term for marking a certain coming of age ceremony and is calling them... "Mitzvah's" (plural) and "Mitzvah" (singular). As in "Planning your son or daughter's Mitzvah". It's just. That's doing something with language.

I come down on the side of "b' mitzvahs" but, you know what. Why not. It makes no sense at all but does it truly need to? We know about which they are referring.

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around here they use "bet" mitzvah which just sounds wrong to me. B'mitzvah works better.

I had to blink at "bet mitzvah" for a couple seconds, yeah. It makes sense but I had to make it work first.

I'm sure someone's come up with an actual gender neutral term in Hebrew but I'm not sure I know of one that doesn't just use an infinitive, which wouldn't be a great noun.

I just will never allow bnei mitzvah. If they're gonna do that, go with bnos mitzvah. What, you wanted a plural that excludes people? Here's a plural that excludes other people :P

That is... doing something with language, for sure.

In my community we call them b-mitzvahs, generally. Bat mitzvah, bar mitzvah, nonbinary kid turning thirteen? it all abbreviates to b-mitzvah.

B mitzvah is very functional! Does everything it needs to!

I usually use b-mitzvah as a general term, and in an earlier generation they were b'nai mitzvah (not great but consistent with Hebrew grammar). I've also heard people refer to the ceremony for a nonbinary or gender-expansive teen as brit mitzvah, kabbalat mitzvah, and gil mitzvah. ALL of these are better than referring to a service and/or a party as a "mitzvah" for the teen in question. I think this crept in as a back-formation from the popular "mitzvah project," which is also annoying but significantly more logical, because the volunteering or fundraising or whatever social-action piece is, in fact, a mitzvah (in the sense of "good deed" if nothing else) that the teen performs. The DJ with the dance routines, not so much.

Of those, I like kabalat mitzvah the best, likely because I'm the sort of person who says "become bar/bat mitzvah", It's amazing how I've come around 360 degrees back to where I started from (actually more hostile than where I started from, now that I've encountered this many more times IRL) on the b mitzvah projects, because I can't stand them now. It's just one more damn thing for the kids to have to do, they're usually half-assed because of it, and it's not even something often done by the kids, rather than the parents (who also have a lot of other things to be doing). The shul whatsapp is like "hey my kid's b mitzvah project is X, please donate money!" or "we're doing a blood drive!" and did the kid come up with this idea? Is the kid actively involved in this idea? Who knows, who cares, I certainly don't, it's just one more thing they're adding to it. Although at least at my shul it's lately been cluttering the whatsapp for bar mitzvahs; one thing I instinctively was like "nope!" about was it being a thing that GIRLS did, because of course girls must do community work, girls must volunteer. I wonder if the boys yeshivas have the same volunteering hours requirement that the beis yaakovs do...

Interesting! It reminds me of "chair" for "chairman/chairwoman/chairperson": dropping all the gendered terms and relying on context for the rest.

I actually do really like "chair" ;) I like it when the gender neutral is actually more specific, like fireman to firefighter, mailman to mail carrier, camera man to camera operator. These all make more sense than the original. And then there's chairman. And chairperson is so clunky. But then there's chair. Chair is great. Are they all sitting on chairs in general? Quite possibly! But one of them is The Chair. And it's perfect.

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Language is in the using of it?

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