In another thread, there was this:
Does that mean that Pontius Pilate actually said of Jesus, “Behold mankind” rather than the unanimously translated “Behold the man”?
Nah… homo means “man” in the sense of "an individual human being, not “mankind” except in the abstract, metaphorical sense in which the two terms are synonymous (“There are some things that man[kind] was not meant to know.” – Any 40-year-old SF B-movie)
What Pilate said was “Behold the man” (with the implication of human being) as opposed to “Behold the adult male human.”
BTW, wouldn’t that be a great title for a book suggesting that Jesus was gay? 
::: ducks and runs :::
In Latin, homo has the connotation of “that guy over there”, whereas vir has the connotation of “macho dude”. I’m not sure that homo would ever have been used for a woman, but it doesn’t suggest any degree of manliness (a quality highly-valued by the Romans).
Polycarp wrote:
Right, that had been my mistake. A better way to say it would have been to say that it meant human' or person.’ It can also be used in the universal sense, as in `mankind.’ But that sense was not relevant to the discussion Libertarian was quoting me from.