advancing changes in language: removing gender bias in words. you give here examples.

The most sexist language, IMO, is Spanish. Everything is either male or female, "Los" or "Las". I grew up hearing both Spanish and German in my family, so I can said with dead certainty that Hispanics are quite sexist and have no inclination to change this.

I see no reason to change our language to gender neutral, because WE are not gender neutral. Very few things in living nature are. We are in this crazy quagmire because people do not want to accept this.

There are some words related to professions that were originally only done by men, but many others are already gender neutral, such as engineer, plumber, electrician, carpenter, teacher, professor, janitor, manager, secretary, etc.

Consider that the word 'mankind' was once gender neutral. Yup, you read that correctly. Whoda thunk it?

Today I found out that the word ‘man’ was originally gender neutral, meaning more or less the same as the modern day word “person”. It wasn’t until about a thousand years ago that the word “man” started to refer to a male and it wasn’t until the late 20th century that it was almost exclusively used to refer to males. Before “man” meant a male, the word “wer” or “wǣpmann” was commonly used to refer to “male human”. This word almost completely died out around the 1300s, but survives somewhat in words like “werewolf”, which literally means “man wolf”.

Women at the time were referred to as “wif” or “wīfmann“, meaning “female human”. The latter “wifmann”, eventually evolved into the word “woman”, but retained its original meaning. The word “wif” itself eventually evolved into “wife”, with its meaning obviously being changed slightly. Interestingly, the word ‘men’, meaning “to think” or “to have a cognitive mind”, was also gender neutral and connected to “man”, which meant “the thinker”.

So we can see from that how “man” originally referred to all humans. Largely due to the stigma that using the word “man” meaning “humans” is supposedly sexist, despite its original meaning, the use of the word “man” in that fashion has all but disappeared in the last 50-100 years, with it now only showing up in words like “human” and “mankind” as referring to both male and female. Even those instances still garners quite a bit of controversy in terms of being thought of as sexist, despite these words pre-dating the point when “man” meant “male” only.

One interesting convention that was thought up in the early 1900s to deal with this issue of “man” coming to mean both male and female and also sometimes meaning males exclusively is, in literature, to do the following: when referring to humans, “man” should be capitalized as in “Man”; when referring to “man” as in “male”, it is to be left lower case. This convention was used in such literary works as “The Lord of the Rings” and was a key point in the prophecy concerning the Witch-king of Angmar: “no man can kill me”, meaning that according to the prophecy a woman, Eowyn, could because “man” in the prophecy was not capitalized.

www.todayifoundout.com...

The origin of today's issue comes from 'butt hurt'. Butt, meaning the back end of any object, and 'hurt', meaning pain or irritation, whether physical or mental. Hence, "butt hurt" means a pain in one's backside, as per our modern lexicon.

Not my butt, but the professor's.

a reply to: FissionSurplus

Boats are gender neutral, they aren't male or female. So why refer to them as she?

Anyways, language is evolving. What you'll likely see in the next 25 years, or possibly even less is they/them/their replacing he/she/his/hers/etc... it's already grammatically correct and the words are widely known. Plus, for those who this affects, that tends to be their preferred word choice.

a reply to: Aazadan

I believe it is this assumption of objectification that is helping lead us down this slope of PC speech...

I don't believe anyone has the thought process of "well, this quad has a similarity to my wife, in that they are both material possessions of mine, so I will refer to my car as a 'she' so everyone knows that the male specimen is the dominant gender, and females are subservient and considered property"

I mean.... not to sound offensive, but it's this overboard mentality that causes so much negative reaction toward certain "progressive" crowds

a reply to: Aazadan

I couldn't tell you why boats are called "She". Maybe it comes from the older ones with the big half nekkid chick on the front. I never owned a boat, although when I see one, I refer to the boat as an 'it'.

Maybe the ancient English mariners didn't like the idea of boarding a 'he'.

a reply to: freestonew

This whole issue has brought back to mind something which I heard many years ago. The question was ... "Why do they not have any female football teams?" Answer ... (and it may sound a little sexist, but that's the point) "because none of them wants to have anything to do with a 'quarter' but they would all claim to be the 'tight end'. Here is where you are supposed to laugh.

As to the renaming or doing away with the genders: I have found the one pronoun which, I think, would cover most of these people. It would be derived from the phrase Can't Understand Nature's Terminology; or simply put C.U.N.T.

This can easily be used to express the male, female, or the absence of gender when addressing persons.

originally posted by: dothedew
a reply to: Aazadan

I believe it is this assumption of objectification that is helping lead us down this slope of PC speech...

I don't believe anyone has the thought process of "well, this quad has a similarity to my wife, in that they are both material possessions of mine, so I will refer to my car as a 'she' so everyone knows that the male specimen is the dominant gender, and females are subservient and considered property"

I mean.... not to sound offensive, but it's this overboard mentality that causes so much negative reaction toward certain "progressive" crowds

Most people go along with it, because that's just how they've learned the language. They don't put any more thought behind it than that. However, that isn't really a justification for a language to not change when people do start paying attention to the thought behind the words.

If anything, it's a good thing because it suggests the average grasp of English is increasing since people are looking at the meanings of words on a large scale like this. I don't think the root cause has anything to do with making things PC, but rather having them make more logical sense.

This is pretty dumb. No ones ever tried to call me out on anything like that. If anything it would P*ss me off and make me use gender nouns even more in their presence.

originally posted by: neo96
It's freggin mankind.

Both man and woMAN.

Commonality.

It isn't 'sexist'.

You inspired me with the solution to this problem. Since females are WOmen. All men can now be HEmen.

All men are now Heman. It fixes everything, now any time men is mentioned in mankind there's no gender confusion as both sexes are clearly men of a different type.

a reply to: freestonew

i'm triggered by the name given to the aquatic mamal: manatee.

what if it is female? a womanatee?

a reply to: Puppylove

There isn't any confusion to begin with.

What's going on is a politically driven agenda telling people 2+2=5.

Adam and Eve.

Man and women.

Adam wasn't confused and pumped up on big pharmacological in to suppress a natural body production of something then paid thousands of dollars to a doctor to make him look like something else.

Eve wasn't either.

I feel like going bibical now.

All these social justice science hijackers are the serpents in the garden of Eden.

a reply to: neo96

What's that vrooooom sound? I think it's an airplane flying over your head. It was a joke. Heman, He-Man, get it? All men can now be He-Man... sheesh...

They've been doing this for decades. In the 1930's, the words "authoress" and "manageress" went out of fashion and were replaced by gender neutral "author" and "manager". Replacing manager with humanager doesn't work, so only the first word changed.

originally posted by: subfab
a reply to: freestonew

i'm triggered by the name given to the aquatic mamal: manatee.

what if it is female? a womanatee?

If you like the music of Manfred Mann, you can't use the first *or* the last name.

originally posted by: Monsieur Neary

originally posted by: subfab
a reply to: freestonew

i'm triggered by the name given to the aquatic mamal: manatee.

what if it is female? a womanatee?

If you like the music of Manfred Mann, you can't use the first *or* the last name.

LoL

Incidentally, does this liberal snowflake initiative apply to other languages as well? Because I speak a few languages and they all have this problem.

originally posted by: loam
Incidentally, does this liberal snowflake initiative apply to other languages as well? Because I speak a few languages and they all have this problem.

Languages evolve at different speeds. I would be interested in seeing a study on how fast Spanish evolves given that it puts gender pronouns on everything and is highly spoken across the world.

when I was a kid it considered impolite to address someone as "hey you" but I guess now that`s considered ok, more ok than saying hey lady, or hey mister.

people are insane

So will history be rewritten and the old archives updated to reflect "That's one small step for a human and one giant step for humankind" ?

a reply to: dothedew

Why is it always the women who are crying

Because they can't take a punch?

originally posted by: FissionSurplus
a reply to: Aazadan

I couldn't tell you why boats are called "She".

Buy a boat. Keep track of how much it costs to maintain it. Then you'll know.