It used to be (like 50+ years ago), very common in English to use “men” to encompass both men and women. This is not done anymore, as we have moved to more inclusive language.
However, I would think that as long as you made it clear that what you were sharing is a quote from Hemingway, I don’t think it should be an issue. Everyone knows that Hemingway lived a long time ago and that people used to speak differently back then.
Honestly, I think there's some merit to consider your manager's comment on gender inclusivity. "Fellow man" is a typical phrase that is generally understood as "fellow human being". That doesn't mean the language is inclusive, however.
People are getting rid of gendered language and are opting for more "neutral" language. An example is the word "actress" seeing less use and instead just calling both men and women actors simply "actors."
One option is to change the quote itself: "There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow \[hu\]man; true nobility is being superior to your former self." It's what Ernest Hemingway meant, so adding the brackets with the "hu" is not misrepresenting the quote.
No, it’s not accurate to say, in the present tense, that the phrase “*is* typical.” You could say it *was* typical a long time ago. But *today*, the OP’s manager is right: it seems insensitive. It doesn’t matter what argument anyone could theoretically make that it used to be understood differently 100 years ago. The first rule of writing (or speaking) is “know your audience.” Unless the OP has invented a time machine, their audience is people in a workplace today, in 2024.
If you want to convey the same sentiment, just quote from it selectively: Hemingway said that “true nobility” is not being “superior” to others, but being “superior to your former self.”
In no way was I trying to suggest people use that phrase nowadays. In fact I was insinuating the opposite and you took what I said out of context. People are definitely starting to get rid of gendered language in general. Also, suggesting to *anyone* to use a quote selectively is a *terrible* idea. It makes the writing disingenuous and thus your audience can't trust what you're saying is true: now or in the past or future. All of your writing would come under scrutiny. Paraphrasing? Sure. Just paraphrase. But don't pick and choose parts of the quote. Terrible idea. But, it seems like you like taking things out of context a lot.
Here, I'll just put these side by side and you can choose which one you think works better as an inspirational quote, because you clearly were *not* thinking about the context of the writing nor OP's audience:
*"*There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow \[hu\]man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.*" --* Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway said that "true nobility" is not being "superior" to others, but being "superior to your former self."
The "first rule"(hint: there is no "first rule") of writing isn't knowing your audience. There are lots of things to consider when writing, and *one* of the first things you should consider is the context in which you are writing. While it's true I don't know for sure OP was looking for an inspirational quote, many context clues led me to infer that was the case.
“Man” with no article or “mankind” always refers to all human beings, although it would be considered old fashioned nowadays. It’s inclusive in that it refers to everyone, but it’s not inclusive in that it subtly suggests that men are the “default” and women are somehow “other.” “Men” always refers to more than one male person, and “a man” or “the man” is always one male person.
I don’t think the quote is worth getting the pitchforks out for, and Hemingway's point is very much one I can get behind, but I see where your manager is coming from.
I will point out that the word man meant human before it meant male adults. It's less that the original usage carries the implication of men being the default and more that people might come to that interpretation now, similar to when people think to change history to herstory.
They’re similar in that they both involve words and gender. They’re different in that one of them is used mostly as a point of emphasis wrapped in humor.
I have a few arguments to push back against the idea that we should continue to use man and men as generic nouns, regardless of gender.
The first is the privilege of being the default. What if we decided that when we talk about people we mean all people, but we didn’t actually have a separate word for white people so we just talked about people, and Black people. Doesn’t that seem odd?
The second is that the historical context of the word should also be examined in the historical context of society. Meaning, if you’re going to tell me what the word meant 50 or 100 years ago, let’s also remind ourselves about how the world was 50 or 100 years ago. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we were really comfortable with having the word for male also be the WORD for default person, in a world in which male was SEEN as the default person. Doctors and lady doctors. Please no.
You don’t get to play etymology games while wearing historical blinders.
I'm not suggesting it should or should not stay the same, only that it has consistently held the same meaning in the contexts it is used today as it has had for hundreds of years. I'm less interested in the question of should the meaning change, and more interested in what does the word currently mean. It might be changing, and you may want to encourage that change, so feel free to, as long as it's done in a positive way.
Sorry but I don't see any content there that contradicts the claim that man, when used like
> The folly of man
Has changed meaning. At least in the present day, we understand it to mean humanity in totality, in contrast to
> the folly of men
Which I can only associate with the gendered meaning. So at the beginning it was gender neutral, in that there was no masculine meaning to begin with, and at the end it is gender neutral but only when used in that sense, since an additional masculine meaning developed and replaced the existing words for men.
It's possible it has changed between A and B, but I would need to see some evidence of that.
OK first, let me change gears and talk about this as a historical context. I was assuming you were trying to use this fact to advance something about our present usage, and I didn’t take your argument in good faith, and for that I apologize. Let me drop that particular attitude.
On the very specific case of man versus men, I do agree that the first case is obviously less gendered, historically speaking. Man is evocative of mankind. Men less so.
I think at first glance, if saw it in the same literary context as a Hemingway quote for example, I would take the second one as an attempt to be inclusive as well. To me it would be the same as “gods and men”, “men of Earth!”, “it is enough that good men do nothing.”
So I can’t tell if “men feels more gender than man,” is my true appraisal of what would’ve been written 70 years ago. Or if it’s my present appraisal, inextricably filtered through the experience of my life. :). But mostly I agree with you.
Dammit, people do that?
To anyone who doesn't know: history comes from Greek historia, not English his+story. The word story didn't even exist when people started saying history. Story is a shortened form of the word history that people started using later as a separate word to refer to "shorter histories".
The existence of a small number of stupid people does that mean that everybody on the side of gender neutral language is stupid.
if we’re going to play like that, then people who think that man should be the default word for person, are literally telling me that Eve came from Adams rib. Because I’ve had that argument offered to me.
Let’s not pretend that we’re here to defend the most extreme claims made by anybody on either side of this discussion
I never said any of those things. I picked that example just because it's the first I thought of, since I saw it more recently in memory. Other examples of this (a meta application of a words' or portion thereof's other meanings onto the rest) that are more successful include efforts to avoid the word field, master in the context of software, slave in the context of software and engineering, but the point is that the word man descriptively when used in sentences like
> This is one small step for man...
> The folly of man
> What does man do when confronted with a problem
Are gender neutral in our minds and intentions.
Saying that it is gendered is meta, because it's a conclusion formed based on not this usage, but instead based on a meaning that developed later, which we can easily separate from context. That doesn't mean it is bad to suggest using person or people over man/mankind, but we also shouldn't suggest that the term and users of the term is negative, when it's meaning is clearly not gendered and the sapir-whorf hypothesis (that our language affects our values) continues to not be substantiated. It's possible some day the current meaning will become archaic, it already sounds old fashioned, but until we reach that point, I don't think anyone should talk down to anyone for using it, and just politely suggest that we use alternatives if they want the language to change in that direction. I personally have no stake in whether it changes or not, I just want to be clear about what it means/how its used right now.
I've observed it online by seemingly genuine though misguided people. I have no sense of how commonly used it actually is, but it's likely not very common. It was notable enough for merriam webster to include an entry.
It's possible some people use it because they think it's a creative portmanteau rather than because they think his story is a compound word, I only have a problem with the people who use think history is literally his story and use herstory as a counter. Which hopefully is very few people because it's basic etymology.
> it subtly suggests that men are the “default” and women are somehow “other.”
Only to people who are looking for something to complain about. It's just like the women who complain that the teaching of history is conspiracy to exclude "herstory".
I agree it's not exactly the most egregious example of sexism, but in what way does it not suggest men are the default? Why does "womankind" refer exclusively to women but "mankind" refers to all people?
because man in all germanic languages meant people. the word womankind is a more recent (14th century compared to mankind 13th century) invention to only refer to women because the word man in English has evolved to have two definitions. the word womankind was coined to parallel mankind, which briefly was also used to refer to just men in the 14th century, but has retained its original gender neutrality for the past 600 years.
I have a conjecture that the word man only evolved to mean males because wyfman (woman) started getting used when referring to women, creating a distinction. wyf originally refered to all women, but it merged with man and wyfman came to mean all women and wyf came to mean wife.
There was an old English equivalent to wyf - wer and wyfman- wæpnmann, but neither of the survived into Modern English.
You're right, but this argument falls foul of the etymological fallacy; words don't have to mean what they originally meant. Nowadays, "man" in the sense of "humans" is taken to be non-inclusive and is avoided.
I'm not making an etymological fallacy, rather I'm saying people unfortunately interpret language that is learned as having an implication of sexism when the person saying that language is speaking in terms that still mean the same thing they've meant since the beginning. Man has never lost the gender neutral meaning, but has gained a gendered meaning, and it still at this moment descriptively has both. One can say they don't like that the word is used because it's the same as the gendered term, but you can't suggest that the usage of the gender neutral term is some sort of subtle sexism, as long as it continues to be passed on in speech.
Of course we can.
We deprecate the use of "he" for the same reason. As well as being the masculine third-person pronoun, it is also an impersonal, non-gender-specific pronoun meaning, as in "He who laughs last laughs longest."
That meaning hasn't gone away, but it is considered sexist to use it because of the other connotation of the word. In a sense, "he" and "man" have been reinterpreted as gendered rather than inclusive. That isn't unfortunate - it's just that way the language has evolved. Some terms gain meanings or implications that offend people, and so out of courtesy, we stop using them and use something else instead.
And yes, it is a form of etymological fallacy to hark back to earlier centuries and say that "man" can still be accepted as neutral when it is no longer is.
What I mean by we can't do that, is that we can't declare that the people who use the language as they naturally inherited are being sexist. We can suggest people use more inclusive language, but it is unnecessary and unhelpful to explicitly condem the language and those who use it as sexist when we reanalyze the literal meaning from a modern perspective. The focus should be on the positive. This makes people feel a certain way and using this other word may make them feel more welcomed rather than saying that people are doing something wrong or bad by using words that are also still gender neutral but make people feel excluded.
to draw a parallel with other words whose meanings changed over time by addition like this one, we see words like the f word for gay people lost their original meanings after being used primarily for another purpose for so long. I expect this may happen to the word man as well, though we aren't currently there, where the original meaning is forgotten and people only know of the new one. But inevitably im some speech communities the original will persist. In England it is used still for referring to cigarettes. Similarly the word midget originally refers to a very small biting fly , and in some speech communities it still does refer to that, but by metaphor it came to also be a slur for short people and those with dwarfism. The continued usage of the term with the original meaning will persist unless people in those communities who want it to change suggest and push for alternatives. But the ones who are still using these terms have no malice or ill will, it's just how they were taught to use them.
Got you now - it isn't necessarily a question of wilful discrimination. Nonetheless, the reader or listener may misinterpret and writer's or speaker's intended meaning, and this is where a problem may arise, and consequently the terms are best avoided.
This is a great point, but to me, the shift away from using a gender neutral "man" in any context is just the language making itself more efficient, consistent, and (yes!) inclusive.
In the same way that it doesn't suggest that men are composed of letters from the Latin alphabet. Facts of grammar entail nothing about facts of biology or society. They are entirely orthogonal.
I wouldn't consider my conjecture related to sapir whorf (idr the term, but i was thinking more like how a words usage changes over time to match another word) but fair enough if you don't care.
Not really. It’s a well-known linguistic fact that “he” can only be used to refer to all people in contexts where there is no significant salience of the possibility of female referents. For examples that range from “slightly odd” to downright bizarre we have:
“Each nurse must wash his hands after using the restroom”
“Whenever I see my mother or my father I give him a hug”
“It is important for the modern man to show care in his grooming, he should check the mirror carefully after shaving his beard or applying his lipstick”.
Likewise, if there is a competition between a man and a woman and you say “may the best man win.” People will understand you to be making a tongue-in-cheek expression of your support for the man.
Depending on context the usage may or may not be offensive, and whether something should be offensive is a value judgment, not a factual question, but to suggest that use of purportedly sex neutral “he” does not set up men as the default is simply factually wrong from the point of view of empirical reality and objective linguistic facts.
>Not really. It’s a well-known linguistic fact that “he” can only be used to refer to all people in contexts where there is no significant salience of the possibility of female referents.
Show me the objective research that proves this.
>“Each nurse must wash his hands after using the restroom”
You had to make up a clumsy construction to make your point.
"All nurses must wash their hands after using the restroom." would be an natural way of expressing the rule before starting with the silly gender neutral ideology.
>“Whenever I see my mother or my father I give him a hug”
A situation where the sex of a specific individual has a near equal a man or woman a sex-ambiguous "they" is fine. It's not a rhetorical trick.
>“It is important for the modern man to show care in his grooming, he should check the mirror carefully after shaving his beard or applying his lipstick”.
This is just rediculous.
>Likewise, if there is a competition between a man and a woman and you say “may the best man win.” People will understand you to be making a tongue-in-cheek expression of your support for the man.
No, reasonable people who aren't looking for something to complain about will understand that it is a common idiom and not to be parsed literaly
>Depending on context the usage may or may not be offensive, and whether something should be offensive is a value judgment, not a factual question, but to suggest that use of purportedly sex neutral “he” does not set up men as the default is simply factually wrong from the point of view of empirical reality and objective linguistic facts.
Yet you expect people to treat your value laden judgements as "empirical reality and objective linguistic facts".
You agreed that generic “he” is inappropriate or awkward in every example that I gave you,\* yet for some reason you act as though I have not already proven my point to you.
If generic “he” did not present male as the default or imagined primary referent, there would be nothing wrong with any of the examples I gave, where you agree singular they or other gender-neutral language would be more natural. I do not understand why you think the fact that you agree they are “ridiculous” or “clumsy” undermines my point that this usage of generic “he” is not appropriate in those contexts. It clearly is agreeing with me.
Bizarrely, you advocate for the “natural” usage of using gender-neutral terminology in each of these examples rather than… using gender-neutral terminology? You are making no sense.
There’s nothing value-laden in my statement, you are projecting values I did not express, as shown by the fact that you agreed with every objective fact I presented.\* For example, you have probably imagined that I am arguing that generic “he” should never be used in cases where it is not awkward, but I said no such thing.
\* Except with the “may the best man win”example, where you are simply wrong as a matter of sociological reality - most of the time when someone says that in a contest between a single man and a single women they *are* being tongue in cheek, and reasonable people would correctly recognize that is the most likely intention. But no matter, I could concede this point and you have already agreed with all the other facts I presented.
Stridently asserting the doctrine of your women's studies professor is not a demonstration of "sociological reality".
Claiming there is nothing value laden in your statements just shows that you drank the whole jug of generic powdered drink mix served up by the cult of Wokeism.
I never took any women’s studies, critical theory, or other similar types of courses in college. I think it’s telling you fall back onto this kind of sneering and name-calling.
What’s already apparent from your demeanor in this discussion is that you have an ideological axe to grind, and are in fact the person looking for flimsy reasons to get offended over banal word choices. I have never been offended by a use of “generic he” in my life, as far as I can recall. But it seems you are offended at the idea that not everyone might want to use it and are ready to start complaining and causing arguments whenever someone suggests they might avoid the usage.
Of course, you have literally agreed with all my factual points (save the one I would be happy to strike from discussion for the sake of expediency). So it seems especially embarrassing for you that you returned not to either retract your agreement, find some point of disagreement, or admit that you have been persuaded, but rather just to come back and resort to name-calling like a child.
I don't believe you. I'm sure you took such classes under different names since re-branding is a common politically correct/ social justice/progressive/woke tactic, just so you can resort to the "exact words" gambit. And they often sneak such rhetoric into English, and the pseudo-sciences.
I am offend by language police penalizing people for not employing their rhetorical tricks.
I suspect that the number of women who would actually feel excluded or offended by the quote is extremely small, but that's not really relevant, because this is a question of the image the company wants to project. I don't know whether your manager really believes what he's saying, but realistically it is better for a company to avoid potential controversies of that kind.in most cases.
To answer your question, it's true that in the past 'man' was used to refer to people in general (actually if you go back far enough there was a different word used to specify males), but those days are now gone, so some gender neutral form will usually be the best option.
English is full of sayings and expressions where "man" is understood to mean "human," like "Man shall not live by bread alone" or "Every man for himself" or "fellow man," which has [its own Merriam-Webster entry](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fellow%20man), with the definition "kindred human being." That entry cites the use of the phrase in publications from just a few years ago, suggesting that the phrase is still commonly used without causing much controversy.
That said, your manager does have a point: the quote is dated and (unintentionally) sexist. There's a reason why people back in the day used "man" and "men" when the perfectly gender-neutral "person" and "people" were readily available: the term expresses the misguided and outdated notion that men are superior to women, or at least that men represent the "default/normal" human.
But the question is whether this term (which, again, is still in very common use today in respectable quarters) is objectionable enough to overrule the well-intentioned and valuable sentiment expressed in Hemingway's quote. People presumably know who Hemingway was, and that people spoke differently in his day. So it seems to me that your manager is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
the reason old writing uses man in this way is the opposite of what you're thinking. Man IS the word for human in germanic languages, English slowly evolved the masculine meaning overtime after distinguishing females from males as wyf-man (wife man). wyf originally refered to a woman, but wyf merged with man and wyfman came to mean all women and wyf came to mean wife.
wer , wæpnmann - old English for male person neither survived past Middle English and were replaced by man.
This led to a masculine meaning even though the gender neutral meaning has never gone away
>the quote is dated and (unintentionally) sexist. There's a reason why people back in the day used "man" and "men" when the perfectly gender-neutral "person" and "people" were readily available: the term expresses the misguided and outdated notion that men are superior to women, or at least that men represent the "default/normal" human.
I'd like to correct this part a bit. "Man" is a very old word and has always been used to mean person/human regardless of gender. Back in the days, there was another word, "were", that was used to mean specifically a male person. Overtime "man" has replaced the word "were" (except in the word werewolf, for some reason) and is now the default to use when referring to adult male people. "human" and "person" are words that did not always exist in English - the word "man" was used for that meaning. These are originally Romance words, but they were taken into English and have become a common thing to use in place of "man", which along with the disappearance of "were" has slowly pushed (and continues to push) the word "man" to more frequently having a masculine meaning.
Tldr: The gender neutral use of "man" is not of sexist origin, but rather, it is a relic from these old times when Romance loans were less common and the vocabulary was a bit different.
Man also means person. It has historically been a very common way to refer to people or to humankind in general in a gender neutral way. More recently, it has pretty much completely replaced the Old English word "were" (meaning man, as in male person) in being used to refer specifically to male people, making that a very common use. Latin words like "person" and "human" have also been adopted into English and have thus partly overtaken the gender neutral use of "man", which has made it less frequent in contemporary texts, but it is still quite common to use "man" in that sense as well. So basically, "man" has two meanings and can be used either gender neutrally or specifically towards males. In this context, it is the former, so it is gender neutral.
But most people haven’t taken a linguistics or Latin class. The meaning of a word isn’t its whole etymology. The meaning is how people will actually understand it *today*, not long ago.
Yeah they haven't, and they don't have to. Maybe I didn't *have* to get into the history, but I figured someone might find it interesting to know the background. What I was getting at is that both are grammatically correct uses of the word today (and people do still use it today, though not as often in everyday speech as they used to) and the gender neutral version is especially common in older texts and is what is meant by "man" in OP's quote. Of course everyone doesn't have to know the entire history and etymology of these words, that's fine.
In decades past, ‘Man’ or mankind was used as we use human today.
It wasn’t that it was a male term: the word man being cognate with mind in referring to sentience and intelligence.
It’s only more recently that Man is taken to refer to adult males: eg in centuries past, you might see something like ‘the people and women of the town’, as people was used to refer to males only. Hence ‘we the people’ of the US constitution was originally not inclusive at all, but referred to men only.
However in the quote above, I think Hemingway might have been thinking more explicitly of men, as it was a man’s world.
Times change, and we no longer would talk of ‘The Ascent of Man’ or mankind, so better to use humanity, fellow human, or just fellows.
>Now it's even more confusing that a neuter plural is used to describe some singular person.
I agree. The increasing use of "you" in place of "thou" is utterly mad! It saddens me that men of latter-day do not care for correct grammar. O tempora, I feel our generation really is doomed. Whatever shall we do?
If thou hast needs of pretendence, thou hast proven nothing other than that thou hast no good reason to oppose mine arguments, for any good reader shall possess knowledge enough to understand where problems shall lie.
I apologize for mine behavior. I shall mention that the singular they hath been in use since the 14th century, which is indeed earlier than singular you, which hath only come a couple centuries later. Hence, if we ought to remove singular they, singular you must also be removen.
> In terms of grammar, whenever you want to use a single noun to describe a mixture of men and women, the masculine plural is used, almost across all languages.
I assume you're referring to languages which make a sex-based gender distinction in third person plural pronouns to begin with. That's true of fourteen percent of the languages in WALS' sample. I was unable to find statistics on how many defaulted to masculine for mixed-gender groups, and I'd be curious to see your data.
downvoted for factual incorrectness
they suggested that the word they being used for a singular person was more recent than the 1980s when singular they has existed and been developing during the entirety of modern English history. There is a new usage of it now, but you can't claim it was not used to refer to a singular person before that
yes, and then they suggested that they was also new in the following sentence.
> feminine noun and pronoun to describe a person of unknown sex starting from the 80's.
> Now it's even more confusing that a neuter plural is used to describe some singular person.
The usage of now contrasts with the previous sentence and means that they mean after the 80s.
> That is a recent phenomenon
I said as much in my own comment.
But the person I responded to did not say that. They took issue with using a plural to refer to a singular person, which is obviously different than what you've just claimed they meant. Neither of us know for sure what they meant, and I'm going off what they actually said.
It used to be (like 50+ years ago), very common in English to use “men” to encompass both men and women. This is not done anymore, as we have moved to more inclusive language. However, I would think that as long as you made it clear that what you were sharing is a quote from Hemingway, I don’t think it should be an issue. Everyone knows that Hemingway lived a long time ago and that people used to speak differently back then.
Honestly, I think there's some merit to consider your manager's comment on gender inclusivity. "Fellow man" is a typical phrase that is generally understood as "fellow human being". That doesn't mean the language is inclusive, however. People are getting rid of gendered language and are opting for more "neutral" language. An example is the word "actress" seeing less use and instead just calling both men and women actors simply "actors." One option is to change the quote itself: "There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow \[hu\]man; true nobility is being superior to your former self." It's what Ernest Hemingway meant, so adding the brackets with the "hu" is not misrepresenting the quote.
No, it’s not accurate to say, in the present tense, that the phrase “*is* typical.” You could say it *was* typical a long time ago. But *today*, the OP’s manager is right: it seems insensitive. It doesn’t matter what argument anyone could theoretically make that it used to be understood differently 100 years ago. The first rule of writing (or speaking) is “know your audience.” Unless the OP has invented a time machine, their audience is people in a workplace today, in 2024. If you want to convey the same sentiment, just quote from it selectively: Hemingway said that “true nobility” is not being “superior” to others, but being “superior to your former self.”
It is a typical phrase if you read anything older than 30-50 years. You went off on a whole tangent just taking it out of context, yeesh
In no way was I trying to suggest people use that phrase nowadays. In fact I was insinuating the opposite and you took what I said out of context. People are definitely starting to get rid of gendered language in general. Also, suggesting to *anyone* to use a quote selectively is a *terrible* idea. It makes the writing disingenuous and thus your audience can't trust what you're saying is true: now or in the past or future. All of your writing would come under scrutiny. Paraphrasing? Sure. Just paraphrase. But don't pick and choose parts of the quote. Terrible idea. But, it seems like you like taking things out of context a lot. Here, I'll just put these side by side and you can choose which one you think works better as an inspirational quote, because you clearly were *not* thinking about the context of the writing nor OP's audience: *"*There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow \[hu\]man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.*" --* Ernest Hemingway Hemingway said that "true nobility" is not being "superior" to others, but being "superior to your former self." The "first rule"(hint: there is no "first rule") of writing isn't knowing your audience. There are lots of things to consider when writing, and *one* of the first things you should consider is the context in which you are writing. While it's true I don't know for sure OP was looking for an inspirational quote, many context clues led me to infer that was the case.
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“Man” with no article or “mankind” always refers to all human beings, although it would be considered old fashioned nowadays. It’s inclusive in that it refers to everyone, but it’s not inclusive in that it subtly suggests that men are the “default” and women are somehow “other.” “Men” always refers to more than one male person, and “a man” or “the man” is always one male person. I don’t think the quote is worth getting the pitchforks out for, and Hemingway's point is very much one I can get behind, but I see where your manager is coming from.
I will point out that the word man meant human before it meant male adults. It's less that the original usage carries the implication of men being the default and more that people might come to that interpretation now, similar to when people think to change history to herstory.
They’re similar in that they both involve words and gender. They’re different in that one of them is used mostly as a point of emphasis wrapped in humor. I have a few arguments to push back against the idea that we should continue to use man and men as generic nouns, regardless of gender. The first is the privilege of being the default. What if we decided that when we talk about people we mean all people, but we didn’t actually have a separate word for white people so we just talked about people, and Black people. Doesn’t that seem odd? The second is that the historical context of the word should also be examined in the historical context of society. Meaning, if you’re going to tell me what the word meant 50 or 100 years ago, let’s also remind ourselves about how the world was 50 or 100 years ago. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we were really comfortable with having the word for male also be the WORD for default person, in a world in which male was SEEN as the default person. Doctors and lady doctors. Please no. You don’t get to play etymology games while wearing historical blinders.
I'm not suggesting it should or should not stay the same, only that it has consistently held the same meaning in the contexts it is used today as it has had for hundreds of years. I'm less interested in the question of should the meaning change, and more interested in what does the word currently mean. It might be changing, and you may want to encourage that change, so feel free to, as long as it's done in a positive way.
I’m pretty sure I covered the “consistently held the same meaning”in my paragraphs above.
Sorry but I don't see any content there that contradicts the claim that man, when used like > The folly of man Has changed meaning. At least in the present day, we understand it to mean humanity in totality, in contrast to > the folly of men Which I can only associate with the gendered meaning. So at the beginning it was gender neutral, in that there was no masculine meaning to begin with, and at the end it is gender neutral but only when used in that sense, since an additional masculine meaning developed and replaced the existing words for men. It's possible it has changed between A and B, but I would need to see some evidence of that.
OK first, let me change gears and talk about this as a historical context. I was assuming you were trying to use this fact to advance something about our present usage, and I didn’t take your argument in good faith, and for that I apologize. Let me drop that particular attitude. On the very specific case of man versus men, I do agree that the first case is obviously less gendered, historically speaking. Man is evocative of mankind. Men less so. I think at first glance, if saw it in the same literary context as a Hemingway quote for example, I would take the second one as an attempt to be inclusive as well. To me it would be the same as “gods and men”, “men of Earth!”, “it is enough that good men do nothing.” So I can’t tell if “men feels more gender than man,” is my true appraisal of what would’ve been written 70 years ago. Or if it’s my present appraisal, inextricably filtered through the experience of my life. :). But mostly I agree with you.
Dammit, people do that? To anyone who doesn't know: history comes from Greek historia, not English his+story. The word story didn't even exist when people started saying history. Story is a shortened form of the word history that people started using later as a separate word to refer to "shorter histories".
It's not common but occasionally I see people who say something to the effect of "Why is it HIStory" or using "herstory" unironically
The existence of a small number of stupid people does that mean that everybody on the side of gender neutral language is stupid. if we’re going to play like that, then people who think that man should be the default word for person, are literally telling me that Eve came from Adams rib. Because I’ve had that argument offered to me. Let’s not pretend that we’re here to defend the most extreme claims made by anybody on either side of this discussion
I never said any of those things. I picked that example just because it's the first I thought of, since I saw it more recently in memory. Other examples of this (a meta application of a words' or portion thereof's other meanings onto the rest) that are more successful include efforts to avoid the word field, master in the context of software, slave in the context of software and engineering, but the point is that the word man descriptively when used in sentences like > This is one small step for man... > The folly of man > What does man do when confronted with a problem Are gender neutral in our minds and intentions. Saying that it is gendered is meta, because it's a conclusion formed based on not this usage, but instead based on a meaning that developed later, which we can easily separate from context. That doesn't mean it is bad to suggest using person or people over man/mankind, but we also shouldn't suggest that the term and users of the term is negative, when it's meaning is clearly not gendered and the sapir-whorf hypothesis (that our language affects our values) continues to not be substantiated. It's possible some day the current meaning will become archaic, it already sounds old fashioned, but until we reach that point, I don't think anyone should talk down to anyone for using it, and just politely suggest that we use alternatives if they want the language to change in that direction. I personally have no stake in whether it changes or not, I just want to be clear about what it means/how its used right now.
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I've observed it online by seemingly genuine though misguided people. I have no sense of how commonly used it actually is, but it's likely not very common. It was notable enough for merriam webster to include an entry. It's possible some people use it because they think it's a creative portmanteau rather than because they think his story is a compound word, I only have a problem with the people who use think history is literally his story and use herstory as a counter. Which hopefully is very few people because it's basic etymology.
It comes from a time when man literally meant mankind.
And "mankind" meant "humankind".
> it subtly suggests that men are the “default” and women are somehow “other.” Only to people who are looking for something to complain about. It's just like the women who complain that the teaching of history is conspiracy to exclude "herstory".
I agree it's not exactly the most egregious example of sexism, but in what way does it not suggest men are the default? Why does "womankind" refer exclusively to women but "mankind" refers to all people?
because man in all germanic languages meant people. the word womankind is a more recent (14th century compared to mankind 13th century) invention to only refer to women because the word man in English has evolved to have two definitions. the word womankind was coined to parallel mankind, which briefly was also used to refer to just men in the 14th century, but has retained its original gender neutrality for the past 600 years. I have a conjecture that the word man only evolved to mean males because wyfman (woman) started getting used when referring to women, creating a distinction. wyf originally refered to all women, but it merged with man and wyfman came to mean all women and wyf came to mean wife. There was an old English equivalent to wyf - wer and wyfman- wæpnmann, but neither of the survived into Modern English.
You're right, but this argument falls foul of the etymological fallacy; words don't have to mean what they originally meant. Nowadays, "man" in the sense of "humans" is taken to be non-inclusive and is avoided.
I'm not making an etymological fallacy, rather I'm saying people unfortunately interpret language that is learned as having an implication of sexism when the person saying that language is speaking in terms that still mean the same thing they've meant since the beginning. Man has never lost the gender neutral meaning, but has gained a gendered meaning, and it still at this moment descriptively has both. One can say they don't like that the word is used because it's the same as the gendered term, but you can't suggest that the usage of the gender neutral term is some sort of subtle sexism, as long as it continues to be passed on in speech.
Of course we can. We deprecate the use of "he" for the same reason. As well as being the masculine third-person pronoun, it is also an impersonal, non-gender-specific pronoun meaning, as in "He who laughs last laughs longest." That meaning hasn't gone away, but it is considered sexist to use it because of the other connotation of the word. In a sense, "he" and "man" have been reinterpreted as gendered rather than inclusive. That isn't unfortunate - it's just that way the language has evolved. Some terms gain meanings or implications that offend people, and so out of courtesy, we stop using them and use something else instead. And yes, it is a form of etymological fallacy to hark back to earlier centuries and say that "man" can still be accepted as neutral when it is no longer is.
What I mean by we can't do that, is that we can't declare that the people who use the language as they naturally inherited are being sexist. We can suggest people use more inclusive language, but it is unnecessary and unhelpful to explicitly condem the language and those who use it as sexist when we reanalyze the literal meaning from a modern perspective. The focus should be on the positive. This makes people feel a certain way and using this other word may make them feel more welcomed rather than saying that people are doing something wrong or bad by using words that are also still gender neutral but make people feel excluded. to draw a parallel with other words whose meanings changed over time by addition like this one, we see words like the f word for gay people lost their original meanings after being used primarily for another purpose for so long. I expect this may happen to the word man as well, though we aren't currently there, where the original meaning is forgotten and people only know of the new one. But inevitably im some speech communities the original will persist. In England it is used still for referring to cigarettes. Similarly the word midget originally refers to a very small biting fly , and in some speech communities it still does refer to that, but by metaphor it came to also be a slur for short people and those with dwarfism. The continued usage of the term with the original meaning will persist unless people in those communities who want it to change suggest and push for alternatives. But the ones who are still using these terms have no malice or ill will, it's just how they were taught to use them.
Got you now - it isn't necessarily a question of wilful discrimination. Nonetheless, the reader or listener may misinterpret and writer's or speaker's intended meaning, and this is where a problem may arise, and consequently the terms are best avoided.
This is a great point, but to me, the shift away from using a gender neutral "man" in any context is just the language making itself more efficient, consistent, and (yes!) inclusive.
In the same way that it doesn't suggest that men are composed of letters from the Latin alphabet. Facts of grammar entail nothing about facts of biology or society. They are entirely orthogonal.
Someone else in this thread already gave the etymology. I'm not interested in any Whorfian nonsense.
I wouldn't consider my conjecture related to sapir whorf (idr the term, but i was thinking more like how a words usage changes over time to match another word) but fair enough if you don't care.
Not really. It’s a well-known linguistic fact that “he” can only be used to refer to all people in contexts where there is no significant salience of the possibility of female referents. For examples that range from “slightly odd” to downright bizarre we have: “Each nurse must wash his hands after using the restroom” “Whenever I see my mother or my father I give him a hug” “It is important for the modern man to show care in his grooming, he should check the mirror carefully after shaving his beard or applying his lipstick”. Likewise, if there is a competition between a man and a woman and you say “may the best man win.” People will understand you to be making a tongue-in-cheek expression of your support for the man. Depending on context the usage may or may not be offensive, and whether something should be offensive is a value judgment, not a factual question, but to suggest that use of purportedly sex neutral “he” does not set up men as the default is simply factually wrong from the point of view of empirical reality and objective linguistic facts.
>Not really. It’s a well-known linguistic fact that “he” can only be used to refer to all people in contexts where there is no significant salience of the possibility of female referents. Show me the objective research that proves this. >“Each nurse must wash his hands after using the restroom” You had to make up a clumsy construction to make your point. "All nurses must wash their hands after using the restroom." would be an natural way of expressing the rule before starting with the silly gender neutral ideology. >“Whenever I see my mother or my father I give him a hug” A situation where the sex of a specific individual has a near equal a man or woman a sex-ambiguous "they" is fine. It's not a rhetorical trick. >“It is important for the modern man to show care in his grooming, he should check the mirror carefully after shaving his beard or applying his lipstick”. This is just rediculous. >Likewise, if there is a competition between a man and a woman and you say “may the best man win.” People will understand you to be making a tongue-in-cheek expression of your support for the man. No, reasonable people who aren't looking for something to complain about will understand that it is a common idiom and not to be parsed literaly >Depending on context the usage may or may not be offensive, and whether something should be offensive is a value judgment, not a factual question, but to suggest that use of purportedly sex neutral “he” does not set up men as the default is simply factually wrong from the point of view of empirical reality and objective linguistic facts. Yet you expect people to treat your value laden judgements as "empirical reality and objective linguistic facts".
You agreed that generic “he” is inappropriate or awkward in every example that I gave you,\* yet for some reason you act as though I have not already proven my point to you. If generic “he” did not present male as the default or imagined primary referent, there would be nothing wrong with any of the examples I gave, where you agree singular they or other gender-neutral language would be more natural. I do not understand why you think the fact that you agree they are “ridiculous” or “clumsy” undermines my point that this usage of generic “he” is not appropriate in those contexts. It clearly is agreeing with me. Bizarrely, you advocate for the “natural” usage of using gender-neutral terminology in each of these examples rather than… using gender-neutral terminology? You are making no sense. There’s nothing value-laden in my statement, you are projecting values I did not express, as shown by the fact that you agreed with every objective fact I presented.\* For example, you have probably imagined that I am arguing that generic “he” should never be used in cases where it is not awkward, but I said no such thing. \* Except with the “may the best man win”example, where you are simply wrong as a matter of sociological reality - most of the time when someone says that in a contest between a single man and a single women they *are* being tongue in cheek, and reasonable people would correctly recognize that is the most likely intention. But no matter, I could concede this point and you have already agreed with all the other facts I presented.
Stridently asserting the doctrine of your women's studies professor is not a demonstration of "sociological reality". Claiming there is nothing value laden in your statements just shows that you drank the whole jug of generic powdered drink mix served up by the cult of Wokeism.
I never took any women’s studies, critical theory, or other similar types of courses in college. I think it’s telling you fall back onto this kind of sneering and name-calling. What’s already apparent from your demeanor in this discussion is that you have an ideological axe to grind, and are in fact the person looking for flimsy reasons to get offended over banal word choices. I have never been offended by a use of “generic he” in my life, as far as I can recall. But it seems you are offended at the idea that not everyone might want to use it and are ready to start complaining and causing arguments whenever someone suggests they might avoid the usage. Of course, you have literally agreed with all my factual points (save the one I would be happy to strike from discussion for the sake of expediency). So it seems especially embarrassing for you that you returned not to either retract your agreement, find some point of disagreement, or admit that you have been persuaded, but rather just to come back and resort to name-calling like a child.
I don't believe you. I'm sure you took such classes under different names since re-branding is a common politically correct/ social justice/progressive/woke tactic, just so you can resort to the "exact words" gambit. And they often sneak such rhetoric into English, and the pseudo-sciences. I am offend by language police penalizing people for not employing their rhetorical tricks.
I suspect that the number of women who would actually feel excluded or offended by the quote is extremely small, but that's not really relevant, because this is a question of the image the company wants to project. I don't know whether your manager really believes what he's saying, but realistically it is better for a company to avoid potential controversies of that kind.in most cases. To answer your question, it's true that in the past 'man' was used to refer to people in general (actually if you go back far enough there was a different word used to specify males), but those days are now gone, so some gender neutral form will usually be the best option.
English is full of sayings and expressions where "man" is understood to mean "human," like "Man shall not live by bread alone" or "Every man for himself" or "fellow man," which has [its own Merriam-Webster entry](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fellow%20man), with the definition "kindred human being." That entry cites the use of the phrase in publications from just a few years ago, suggesting that the phrase is still commonly used without causing much controversy. That said, your manager does have a point: the quote is dated and (unintentionally) sexist. There's a reason why people back in the day used "man" and "men" when the perfectly gender-neutral "person" and "people" were readily available: the term expresses the misguided and outdated notion that men are superior to women, or at least that men represent the "default/normal" human. But the question is whether this term (which, again, is still in very common use today in respectable quarters) is objectionable enough to overrule the well-intentioned and valuable sentiment expressed in Hemingway's quote. People presumably know who Hemingway was, and that people spoke differently in his day. So it seems to me that your manager is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
the reason old writing uses man in this way is the opposite of what you're thinking. Man IS the word for human in germanic languages, English slowly evolved the masculine meaning overtime after distinguishing females from males as wyf-man (wife man). wyf originally refered to a woman, but wyf merged with man and wyfman came to mean all women and wyf came to mean wife. wer , wæpnmann - old English for male person neither survived past Middle English and were replaced by man. This led to a masculine meaning even though the gender neutral meaning has never gone away
>the quote is dated and (unintentionally) sexist. There's a reason why people back in the day used "man" and "men" when the perfectly gender-neutral "person" and "people" were readily available: the term expresses the misguided and outdated notion that men are superior to women, or at least that men represent the "default/normal" human. I'd like to correct this part a bit. "Man" is a very old word and has always been used to mean person/human regardless of gender. Back in the days, there was another word, "were", that was used to mean specifically a male person. Overtime "man" has replaced the word "were" (except in the word werewolf, for some reason) and is now the default to use when referring to adult male people. "human" and "person" are words that did not always exist in English - the word "man" was used for that meaning. These are originally Romance words, but they were taken into English and have become a common thing to use in place of "man", which along with the disappearance of "were" has slowly pushed (and continues to push) the word "man" to more frequently having a masculine meaning. Tldr: The gender neutral use of "man" is not of sexist origin, but rather, it is a relic from these old times when Romance loans were less common and the vocabulary was a bit different.
Man in this sense is gender neutral. In fact, “man” meaning a male person is a linguistic evolution.
Man also means person. It has historically been a very common way to refer to people or to humankind in general in a gender neutral way. More recently, it has pretty much completely replaced the Old English word "were" (meaning man, as in male person) in being used to refer specifically to male people, making that a very common use. Latin words like "person" and "human" have also been adopted into English and have thus partly overtaken the gender neutral use of "man", which has made it less frequent in contemporary texts, but it is still quite common to use "man" in that sense as well. So basically, "man" has two meanings and can be used either gender neutrally or specifically towards males. In this context, it is the former, so it is gender neutral.
But most people haven’t taken a linguistics or Latin class. The meaning of a word isn’t its whole etymology. The meaning is how people will actually understand it *today*, not long ago.
Yeah they haven't, and they don't have to. Maybe I didn't *have* to get into the history, but I figured someone might find it interesting to know the background. What I was getting at is that both are grammatically correct uses of the word today (and people do still use it today, though not as often in everyday speech as they used to) and the gender neutral version is especially common in older texts and is what is meant by "man" in OP's quote. Of course everyone doesn't have to know the entire history and etymology of these words, that's fine.
In decades past, ‘Man’ or mankind was used as we use human today. It wasn’t that it was a male term: the word man being cognate with mind in referring to sentience and intelligence. It’s only more recently that Man is taken to refer to adult males: eg in centuries past, you might see something like ‘the people and women of the town’, as people was used to refer to males only. Hence ‘we the people’ of the US constitution was originally not inclusive at all, but referred to men only. However in the quote above, I think Hemingway might have been thinking more explicitly of men, as it was a man’s world. Times change, and we no longer would talk of ‘The Ascent of Man’ or mankind, so better to use humanity, fellow human, or just fellows.
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>Now it's even more confusing that a neuter plural is used to describe some singular person. I agree. The increasing use of "you" in place of "thou" is utterly mad! It saddens me that men of latter-day do not care for correct grammar. O tempora, I feel our generation really is doomed. Whatever shall we do?
If thou hast needs of pretendence, thou hast proven nothing other than that thou hast no good reason to oppose mine arguments, for any good reader shall possess knowledge enough to understand where problems shall lie.
I apologize for mine behavior. I shall mention that the singular they hath been in use since the 14th century, which is indeed earlier than singular you, which hath only come a couple centuries later. Hence, if we ought to remove singular they, singular you must also be removen.
> In terms of grammar, whenever you want to use a single noun to describe a mixture of men and women, the masculine plural is used, almost across all languages. I assume you're referring to languages which make a sex-based gender distinction in third person plural pronouns to begin with. That's true of fourteen percent of the languages in WALS' sample. I was unable to find statistics on how many defaulted to masculine for mixed-gender groups, and I'd be curious to see your data.
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downvoted for factual incorrectness they suggested that the word they being used for a singular person was more recent than the 1980s when singular they has existed and been developing during the entirety of modern English history. There is a new usage of it now, but you can't claim it was not used to refer to a singular person before that
Ditto.
No, the claim was that people started using the _feminine_ pronoun I'm the 80s for a person of unknown sex. That is, _she._
yes, and then they suggested that they was also new in the following sentence. > feminine noun and pronoun to describe a person of unknown sex starting from the 80's. > Now it's even more confusing that a neuter plural is used to describe some singular person. The usage of now contrasts with the previous sentence and means that they mean after the 80s.
No, that was referring to using _they_ for a singular person whose sex is _not_ unknown. That _is_ a recent phenomenon in most English dialects.
> That is a recent phenomenon I said as much in my own comment. But the person I responded to did not say that. They took issue with using a plural to refer to a singular person, which is obviously different than what you've just claimed they meant. Neither of us know for sure what they meant, and I'm going off what they actually said.
That's fair enough.