I do not like yn 'stead of an.
Heh, “cool” mis-spellings like that get under my skin. I refuse to see the Fast and the Furious movies because of the second movie’s title: “2 Stupid 4 English”
Also, I had to laugh when I was in a Cingular store and I saw the big banner they had advertising a back-to-school special on two Motorola phones: The RAZR and the RCKR. As in, “Razor” (the really thin flip phone) and the “Rocker” (the phone with an iTunes MP3 player built-in).
That’s right, a back to school special featuring two badly mis-spelled products. :smack:
That’s not to say I wouldn’t BUY the RAZR if I had $300 burning a hole in my pocket, it’s a phone cool enough to overcome it’s own retarded marketing. 
No, as the linked definition says, the meaning is “woman-man”, with the word “man” in the generalized sense of “human being”. The wif that became “wife” simply means “female person”. The word “housewife” is literally “house woman”, and the phrase “man and wife” was originally understood as simply “man and woman”. It’s just that the meaning of wife gradually became more specialized until it was explicitly understood by most people as referring to a female who was married to a particular man. See this discussion of the word “fishwife”, which mentions in passing the still-common term “midwife” as a surviving example of the original denotation of “wife”.
< Googles > Apparently so.
Excuse me, but as a Masculinist (thank you Tim Allen), I would like to suggest that you replace “bother” with “bothim”.
Thank you for your cooperation. 
Wait- so following that logic out, “womyn” are a subset of “humynity”, but “men” are not part of “humynity”? Who’s sexist now?
LOL!!! You win. You win the thread.
I’m one of the Dope’s most notorious, outspoken feminists, but I’m also a lover of the English language and an etymologist. I always write “women” with an “e.” I have no problem with the endings -man and -men in woman and women, because I know they just mean ‘human being’.
Thanks to Sternvogel for clarifying the Old English etymology. That’s the way to fight ignorance! As the Hindu philosopher Shankaracarya said, the only cure for ignorance is knowledge.
Other languages have taken the word for “woman” and specialized it to mean “wife,” for example Latin mulier ‘woman’ became Italian moglie with the specific meaning of ‘wife’. Meanwhile Spanish mujer, from the same origin, still means ‘woman’. The Italian word for woman is donna, from Latin domina ‘lady’ literally the mistress of the house (domus). The process of semantic lowering of the word’s meaning from ‘woman of the property-owning class’ to woman in general of any social class is called pejoration.
The Proto-Indo-European root *gwen- meaning generally ‘woman’, which produced so many words for ‘woman’ in daughter languages, like Greek gyne, Czech žena, Irish bean, Persian zan, or Swedish kvinna, became the English word queen. This shows the opposite semantic movement, called amelioration.
As a really curious coincidence, the Old Japanese word womina ‘woman’, which looks like a blend of English woman and Latin domina, has now become Japanese onna, which resembles Italian donna.
In French, German, and many other languages, the word for woman (femme, Frau, etc.) must do double duty for ‘wife’, although I’m not sure how they avoid confusion.
The English word wife is the cognate of German Weib meaning ‘woman’. (The more usual German word Frau is another example of pejoration; it originally meant ‘noblewoman’.) These words come from proto-Germanic *wibam ‘woman’. The origin is the Proto-Indo-European root *ghwibh- ‘pudenda’, also source of Tocharian A kwipe and Tocharian B kip, ‘female pudenda’. The gender contrast was made in Old English between wæpen-man ‘weapon-person’ (man) and wif-man ‘vulva person’ (woman).
That “man” in the unmarked form later got the default meaning of ‘male’ shows dominance and privilege given to the male gender in language reflecting men’s dominant social status. In language, unmarked forms are used for higher prestige referents, while subordinate ones are named with qualifying terms.
I don’t use it, but it doesn’t trouble me. I assume from the amount of rancor that it generates in this thread that it continues to fulfil one of its purposes, which is to draw one’s active attention.
I was joking. And I’m female, FWIW.
I have no problem with “women” and I think “womyn” is ridiculous and unnecessary.
Let’s try that last piece again, hitting “quote” rather than “post”:
Cool. How would male Doppers feel about switching to a generic female pronoun?
However, it can also be used to mean “wife,” as can French femme, although esposa is in somewhat more common use than épouse is.
FWIW, the same thing happens in Catalan as in Italian: dona “woman,” muller “wife.” However, dona can also be used for “wife”: el home que va confundir la seva dona amb un barret “the man who mistook his wife for a hat.”
Oddly, of the European languages I know, English is the only one where the word for “woman” is a derivative, instead of being a root in itself; but it’s also the only one where “queen” is a root in itself, rather than the feminine of “king.” (Compare the various cognates of Königin or regina.) Interesting, ne?
:dubious: What about terms like “superman”, “superpower”, “hyperwar”, “longbow”, “hypertext”, or “ultraefficient” then ?
I’m surprised that so few of the femextremists seem to have noticed that the word person is objectionable because is contains son. Perchild is the obvious option. Or, to avoid accusations of “ageism,” perbeing.
Please excuse a typo. In my comment above, “because is contains” should have been “because it contains.”
When I was going to SF State, one of the professors was Elana Dykewomon.
Then there’s the fundie group who used the term "Heaven-O instead of Hello.
I think there’s a thread about this but I’'m too lazy to search.
To me there are 2 different things:
Man - could be used for mankind, which includes both genders.
man/women refer to a single gender of us (Human).
Now the confusion between man = mankind, and man = male leads to a bit of confusion, but in no way do I see ‘woman’ as any less or subordinate to ‘man’.
I do see womyn as a inferior subspecies of mankind however.
This is something chycks used to do back in the McGill Daily student paper back in 1996 – do navelgazer feminists still even use the word? It’s tough for me to take people like this seriously.
If I wanted to spell “woman” so that it bore no semblance etymologically to “man”, I think I would go with “beyatch”.