The ascent of "guy" (1999)
muse.jhu.edu
muse.jhu.edu
The development of the modern word "woman" is interesting. It descends from the word combination "wif" + "man". The "i" gradually changed to an "o". However the plural (women) retains the original "i" sound. The word "wif" on its own changed to our modern word "wife"[2].
A lot of our modern words which contain "-man" or "man-" in them developed in Old English. The word "mankind" for instance is present in Beowulf. It is spelled "manna cynnes" or "mancynn".
One last note, the word "wer" predates the English language. It dates back to Proto-Indo-European, and shows up in many different languages. For example in Latin it is "vir"
If you want a Beowulf side-by-side translation: https://heorot.dk/beowulf-rede-text.html
[1] Cool to see the word "sprecan" and it's similarity to modern German "sprechen".
[2] Which has always made me wonder about the phrase "I pronounce you man and wife". What meanings of "man" and "wife" were common when that phrase originated.
The same happened with "knife" and "knives", and the pronunciation of "path" vs "paths" (the "s" sound is voiced, and caused the "th" to be voiced as well).
The word wer lives on to this day, as part of werewolf.
“He’s a nice Steve.” “Ted is an awesome Chad!”
Hello, fellow!
Is this what an echo chamber looks like?
Conservatives have been saying this forever, and its not coming true. They said it about gay slurs and racism and have been saying it forever about sexism. They're born to lose and can't stop complaining about how Being Appropriate at Work is so hard These Days.
The first time I heard this from the political right was about “political correctness” when I was in grade school nearly 40 years ago.
I don't see any evidence that it is any more true now than it was then.
Could you just read this again and think about it a little? Amazing zinger there.
"Fellow space travelers" is similarly exclusionary. Did you consider at all that the vast majority of people who have ever been to space have been rich white men? Not to mention the extremely problematic imperialistic undertones of the entire American space program. Anyone who isn't from a privileged background is again ostracized by your words.
Calling a mixed group "guys" isn't that big of a deal. But considering how computer science skews heavily towards men, it sounds tone deaf to double down when asked not do it. Because you'll have teams with one or two women for a dozen men, and because these women have been in groups with similar women/men ratios their whole careers, we need to make extra efforts to make sure they feel included.
It's not going to fix the gender disparity on its own. It's just a small effort to show some good will.
This is not a good hill to die on. I expected a more nuanced take on Hacker News.
Is there any response I could give to this out-of-the-blue criticism besides quietly judging the requester and moving on? I make very little apology for using language in this way, and I was surprised it was interpreted in the most inflammatory way possible.
“Guys” as a collective noun has no sex/gender. It’s as gendered as “y’all”. Words can have different meanings.
Fuck those people.
Just don't use "guys" and move on. Easy.
This soon stopped just before our first female colleague joined. Our boss pulled us all in to a meeting to inform us that we now have to use gender-neutral terms like "folks" and "peeps", and there was to be no more joking around gendered forms of address. What a spoilsport.
It was about as efffective and intelligent as it sounds. /s
fascinated by this "/s"
One usage that is definitely single-sex is, one male might say to another male,
"Hi guy, how ya doin'?"
"OK, guy, let me tell you how to do this."
But he'd never say that to a female.
However, it wouldn't be that unusual to say to a whole group of women, whether one is male OR female,
"Hi guys, let's get started."
Chief, on the other hand, I've only heard directed at males.
Only that one guy would use it for one person, sometimes similar to whatchamacallit: "Guy! Whaddareya doin up there?!" "C'mon, guy! We're gonna be late!" "Any of you guys see my toolbox? Did guy take it again?" (Which guy, man? Dude, there's like ten guys here. Bro, you gotta be more specific.)
'Female' is the adjective; 'woman' is the noun. It's neither difficult nor rude.
We manage it with 'male' and 'man' without controversy.
Adjectives and nouns are slippery things, and compound nouns exist besides.
FWIW, a quick corpus search of COCA[1] for `DET female VERB` [(a|the) female (eats|plays|chooses...)] yields 63 total attestations in the corpus (59 unique).
The same with `male` yields 65 (57 unique).
So it's a thing that happens in English.
That's an abbreviation of 'the female of the species' which is essentially writing out a definition of 'woman' except for the given species, since a woman is a human and there probably generally isn't an equivalent (and if there is it won't be widely known) for most species.
Other than to humorous effect (Wodehouse was fond of it) it is redundant and not useful for describing humans. The female of the human species is called a woman, and this is widely known.
> relax
> So it's a thing that happens in English.
I don't have to like it.
Using the wrong their/they're/there is also 'a thing that happens in English', if by English we mean the words of people aiming to use it.
An interesting intuition, do you have anything to back it up?
> I don't have to like it.
Now that I empathize with, but I don't think there's much to be done in this case.
It (unlike the shortening) is grammatical, and a common enough phrase to have a Wikipedia disambiguation page:
"A female will find multiple mates in spring" "The male burrows deep into the ground in the winter and begins to hibernate"
These seem fine to me and are not strict shortenings of "The Female of the Species".