A Person Paper on Purity in Language

In the universe of the satire your comment would have been:

I don't really know what to make of this satire... I find this confusing:

> In most contexts, it is self-evident when "man" is being used in an inclusive sense, in which case it subsumes members of the fairer sex just as much as the stronger.

That's definitely not how that works. "Man" and "woman" are opposite in the dictionary. Looking up the term "white" in the dictionary [1][2], they all contain as one of the definitions of "a human being of any race; a person" or something like it. It is at worst an unclear-but-possible construal to use the word "white" to imply "person," whereas construing "man" to mean "man or woman" is not how any version of English works.

[1]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/white

[2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/white

[3]: https://www.google.com/search?q=definition+white

Technically, before the ideologically-charged forced meme took over, both masculine товарищ tovarišč and feminine товарка tovarka were in use for “comrade”, but only the former was chosen for the newspeak as a gender-neutral title, in line with the Revolution’s professed equal-rights ideals. (Yes, seriously. Of course, the Revolution’s professed ideals at a particular time and place are to be distinguished from its ideals next year, the next town over, or indeed its actual goals or consequences.) The forcing was so effective that the title now only remains in military regulations, the ideology being both out of fashion and rarely relevant, and even the original generic term has essentially fallen out of use with no real replacement (I understand “comrade” in English has also suffered as a result).

I’d say titles are a red herring, though,—unlike e.g. Polish, Russian doesn’t really use them outside a few exceptions (a news article might refer to Professor $SURNAME, a letter might be addressed to Master Ambassador), and essentially never to address somebody in person. That role traditionally falls to $NAME $PATRONYMIC (thanks to the Varangians), though you might hear $NAME nowadays as well.

The problem is that every adjective, numeral, or possessive that attaches to a noun and every pronoun that refers to it depend on whether the noun is {{{animate,inanimate} {masculine,feminine},neuter} singular,plural} and which case it is in. (Unlike in Romance languages, plural forms are not gendered.) Having a grammatical gender is not optional, and being neuter means that you are either dead or were never alive to begin with. (The converse is not true: тело telo “body” is neuter, труп trup “corpse” is inanimate masculine, мертвец mertvec “dead man or woman” is animate masculine. The sex of the diseased makes no difference.)

Common nouns that refer to people—professions, roles, demonyms, agents, patients, etc.—are usually either masculine only whatever the referent or have separate masculine and feminine forms following one of a half-dozen patterns. (This is no Slovak, a single feminine suffix would be much too simple.) Many are formed from other words by productive or long-fossilized but still recognized rules. None can be gender-neutral.

That’s stupid.