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Comment by pje | Hacker News Reader

> Man, in his ceaseless curiosity and desire for knowledge (and also the need to understand the universe around him)

please please please stop using "man" and "he" to refer to the whole species, tyvm

The author is brazillian, so english is most likely not his first language. Linguistic and cultural trends and sensitivities are not the same everywhere.

Thank you for highlighting the sexism built into the Portuguese language.

Actually, the sexism is all English. Other languages have gender-neutral words for the English "man", such as the greek "anthropos", human. That's the word that sentence would be translated to, and "human" encompasses all genders.

I don't speak Portuguese, but it's not inconceivable that they'd use "humanidade" in this context, rather than "homem".

See definition 4 here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/man#Noun

GP is obviously aware of that way of using 'man'. That's why they're asking people to stop doing that. Besides, a dictionary* simply describes the way we use words - those ways can change. Language is not set in stone.

* descriptivist, as most are

Part of the privilege is that it's invisible. "Things have always been this way."

You (like almost all SJWs out there) seem to misunderstand the meaning of "privilege".

"Privilege" is something given by a royal or government decree to some specific person or group. The normal state is "unprivileged", and "privileges" are to be eliminated by rational society.

Meanwhile, when speaking of sexism and racism, there is no "privilege", because the "unprivileged" state is not normal (and the whole society is not mean to be reduced to it). You might speak about "discrimination" or "oppression", but "privilege" seems to reverse the meaning.

Semantics nerd out.

Why? Words can have more than one meaning.

I don't have references on this, but if there's a meaning that's used 99.999% of the time, it probably influences the way we perceive the other meanings. So the typically used man=male meaning bleeds into the man=civilization meaning, creating the sense that men are the most important part of our civilization...

> I don't have references on this

And others disagree with this, and consider your efforts unnecessary. I don't think the two camps will ever agree, mostly because it's very hard to prove that using "man" as a synonym for "humanity" implies that women aren't a part of humanity.

Just stop. No one is going to hand you an award for this. "Man" being a synonym for humankind didn't stop being a thing because some guys felt guilty somewhere.

Edit: looking at all of the damage this has spawned, I'm sorry. Blame me. I didn't think everyone was going to get taken out from this.

We would prefer that you humans use the term "its" in the future to denote your total insignificance in the cosmos.

Pro tip: you're not John Oliver. Stop pretending you are. You realize no one who says that is trying to be a dick, right?

I agree, but look at the awful thread your comment spawned.

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