If “men” means “men and women,” then what word can be used to specially mean only “men”?
Actually, “wer” or “were”, as in “werewolf”, is the English word for “male human”. Unfortunately, it dropped out of use, apart from two archaisms (“wergild” being the other) leaving “man” stuck with double duty.
Frankly, I think it’s ridiculous to get all in a lather about using ‘man’, ‘mankind’, or indeed huMAN or perSON :rolleyes: Of course we’d then have to expunge ‘perSONality’, etc. to the point of utter insanity.
English lacks neutral pronouns so defaulted to the masculine. I learned it that way and I’m fine with it. I have more trouble with the difference between ‘you’ singular and plural, truth to tell.
I also completely disagree with removing ‘man’ from words like ‘chairman’ and ‘mailman’ and I don’t think turning ‘waitress’ into ‘waiter’ and ‘actress’ into ‘actor’ was an improvement. In fact, I think it’s hilarious that the very people who got so upset about non-feminine words like ‘chairman’ were the same people who wiped out the existing ones like ‘waitress’. :rolleyes:
If you must see male penis masculine when you hear ‘man’, that’s your option. It’s not obligatory, nor is it a natural default. I’m betting most people never even noticed it or thought about it until someone told them they should be upset.
Why do people make these sorts of statements? You’ve made no point. There is a pronoun for the female in that case and it’s appropriate to use it. Nobody’s saying that we wipe out the existing ones; just that we use what we’ve got.
The people who are offended by being referred to in masculine terms are equally offended by being referred to in feminine terms. You haven’t quite figured it all out: they want to be referred to in terms that aren’t based upon their gender, unless their gender is relevant to the subject under discussion, which it most certainly is not with waiter/waitress, etc.
I am guessing you are not female. If you are not, it is stupid to attempt to assert that women did or did not feel belittled or marginalized or whatever they might feel until someone “told” them to feel that way. In a society in which gender played such an important role, and in which one gender was routinely marginalized by the actions of the other, it would hardly be surprising to find out that the marginalized gender always found the discrimination in speech annoying at a minimum.
Your aproach to this reminds me of those who think that Amerinds shouldn’t be offended by “benign” mascots based upon European-American stereotypes of the indigenous peoples, and wouldn’t be if someone didn’t tell them to be. :rolleyes:
Why should we use something that works poorly, entrenches disparate treatment, offends more than half our society, and can easily be changed? You remind me of a cranky old man, upset that his chair can’t be placed on the same spot of lawn one morning at the rest home. 
My point is that if there’s some reason why “he” shouldn’t be acceptable for Nancy Pelosi, that same reason should also apply to using “he” for an unspecified person. If it were acceptable to use “he” for a person known to be either gender, then it would be acceptable to use it for a person of unknown gender, but given that it’s not acceptable for a person known to be female, it puts the lie to the claim that “he” is neutral.
(looks down, sees boobs are still there. Further down - no penis).
Wrongo.
Anyone who was that I ever heard of was so because of facts around employment issues or economic issues, not over the use of words.
That would assume that they would consider that the English structures they were taught meant ‘neutral’ were indeed neutral. In fact, if anyone was marginalized by that, logically speaking, it was men, who had to share some of their pronouns with women.
Not at all the same thing. Not even close. We are talking long-term castrating of the male terms to service women; something very different from ‘mascots’.
Interesting theory. I know several women who would disagree. Violently. They dislike intensely the use of any gender-specific terms, male or female, for what they do, who they are, etc. They dislike male-based terms for obvious reasons (as one succinctly puts it, “what image do you get when you hear the word fireman?”), but they also dislike female-based terms (stewardess, e.g.) for the simple reason that they also peg women, assigning them to female roles, which not only discriminates against them, but also make it uncomfortable for men to become those things.
I guess we’ll just have to disagree about this. At least you are not being a patronizing man on the subject, so I will give you that. 
Don’t feel bad, Quiddity. To many of my countrymen, like DSYoungEsq, no true feminist could accept the neutrality of words that have both neutral & masculine connotations, or say, as Joanna Russ did, “I am a man!”
I don’t really want to buy a copy of The Female Man just for that speech, but I feel like quoting it when I stumble across these arguments.
By the way, I don’t like to be tagged by it online, so don’t use a sexed username, but I am a goom. I mean, a wer. A chap, a dude, homo virilis. And I do think that the modern dialects of the English language are screwy for using “man” for this concept when it means “person” in compounds & the like, & I do see the sexism of it. But I also respect the strangeness of language since I learned that all “-chen” diminutives in German are neuter, & understand that usage is not there to be Year Zeroed without reference to roots older than a few generations, lest our relation to our literary heritage become merely comical incomprehension.
Since we do have neutral words like “person” “a” “the,” there’s no need to use gender terms when they do not apply.
Does anything sound more stupid than saying “Madame Chairman?”
Well, I think singularizing “they” sounds a lot more stupid than “Madame Chairman,” which sounds quite correct to me–& which, etymologically, would make perfect sense if the Normans hadn’t tossed goom & wer from the the language, & sexist people of the intervening generations hadn’t started using “man” to mean “virile.” (Which is probably due not only to endemic attitudes of the Middle Ages, but the rise of Christianity & the difficulty of translating the Christian scriptures into English as it was. The Greek & Hebrew of Xtian scripture are both more etymologically sexist, in that they treat the male human as default, & the female as sex object, than was Old English.)
What is this?
Why is it such a problem? It is not “plainly a horrible idea” to me or to many other people. Losing a distinction between singular and plural is not that big a problem: English lost the distinction between singular “thou” and plural “you” many centuries ago; many English nouns have the same for in singular and plural; and many languages (e.g., Chinese and Japanese) do not have singular/plural forms.
Whether “they” is semantically one or many people will generally be clear from the context, and if it’s not, you can make it clear, e.g., by saying “that person” or “those people”.
Nothing else really works (IMHO), and the only problem with the use of “they” is that it appears to break singuylar/plural in English, e.g., a sentence like:
“If a student thinks they know everything, then they fool themself.”
Yes: that example is problematic. In it, “thinks” is singular, “know” and “fool” are plural, then you return to singular with “-self”. But, to me, it sounds better than using “he” and creating the impression that the student must be male.
I do not get the whole fuss here. First, I should admit that English is not my first language, so perhaps I miss the subtleties. But judging from German, there is difference between the gender of a word (genus) and the gender of the object in question (sexus). And the two can be different! Which is very common for things (where the word is not neutral, but the object is), but also in other cases like the one discussed here, where the word has a gender but the gender of the object is unknown.
So from a linguistic point of view, it is perfectly fine to use a word with gender for a set of objects with unknown gender. They are just unrelated. Admittedly even the Germans often do not get it (although the language explicitly contains the distinction), leading to similar discussions as the one here.
Using “gender neutral” words (i.e. words with a neutral genus) is often awkward in German, as words tend to have a non-neutral genus, even if the sexus is neutral/undefined. Thus people trying to be political correct tend to write both a male and a female form. The funny thing is that this does not happen in all cases. For example the word for murderer is male, although of course it also covers female murderers. But I have never seen the male/female double form for it… (or similar negative words). There always the male form is accepted.
Overall I find the forced assumption genus=sexus silly, as it is obviously not the case for non-human related things, too. And nobody cares there. So why all this fuss just to interpret the language in away that it has not developed?
It is less silly in English than in many other inflected languages for one simple fact: nouns in English do not generally carry a gender. That is to say, a “table” is not a masculine or feminine noun (or a neuter noun, for that matter). This is because words that refer to it (such as definite and indefinite articles, adjectives, etc.) do not have to take an inflected form that depens upon the “gender” of the noun. So, where in German we would say *der Tisch * or die Tür or das Fenster, in English it’s the table, *the door * and the window.
So, since nouns in English are not generally gendered, use of a noun that has a particular gender associated with it, such as stewardess or fireman, becomes more of a conflict than it might in languages where all nouns are gendered, and often the noun for an occupation, let’s say, doesn’t match the gender of the person in that occupation. As a man, it would be bad enough for me to be called a “stewardess.” In a male-dominated society, with all the prejudices and stereotypes and discriminations suffered by the “fairer sex,” I can only imagine how many of them must feel to hear that so many of our jobs are intended for men.
Most job titles today are non-gendered: Police Officer, Fire Fighter, Flight Attendant, Letter Carrier.
Doesn’t this strike you as goofy? Among other things, the ‘female-based terms’ generally have a male-based opposite; steward, for example.
Yes, but what if you’re on a large plane with several such folks on it, two male and two female? Is it then “The stewardesses demonstrated the safety features of the airplane.”, or “The stewards…”? Either way, you’re mischaracterizing half the crew, a problem which does not come up if you switch to the neutral (though unfortunately more cumbersome) “flight attendants”.
While officially true, most people still say, “Policeman, Fireman, Mailman” etc.
Eventually, we’ll degender the terms.
Hopefully, to get back to the OP, we’ll degender “he/him/his.” After all, we degendered the third-person plural.
Really? I usually use the de-gendered terms even when speaking of an individual: He is a police officer. I would feel silly calling the lovely Natasha our “mailman.”