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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

I’m interested what you saw here that I clearly missed when I read it. Were you keying into something with the contemporary effort to replace a lot of language with gender neutral terms?

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Yes. "Man" and "mankind" are already low key deprecated terms, because they reinforce a very strong historical bias towards male being the "default" sex. In this worldview, society is made of men, and women are accessories. Modern language prefers more egalitarian terms like "humans" and "humanity". The parent was arguing for "egalitarianism" in favor of so-called "reverse sexism" - a point of view I am very sympathetic with - but went out of their way to avoid contemporary sexually neutral terminology in favor of outdated and overtly sexist terminology. Pushback against the overwhelming backlog of casual male-dominating sexism that they deliberately exemplified is the entire reason for the "pushing the pendulum the other way" that they attack. Hence their point was immediately undermined.

Given the overtness of the rhetorical maneuver and the response of the poster, I have to believe it was intentional and possibly bait.

If we're going to go that kind of linguistic route, then "human" is also just a type of "man". Making "man" still the default.

This kind of argument doesn't make sense to me.

The words "human" and "man" are etymologically unrelated. It's just a coincidence they both have m-a-n in them.

"late Middle English humaine, from Old French humain(e), from Latin humanus, from homo ‘man, human being’. The present spelling became usual in the 18th century; compare with humane."

and for man:

"Old English man(n), (plural) menn (noun), mannian (verb), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch man, German Mann, and Sanskrit manu ‘mankind’."

Interestingly enough, Manu was "the progenitor of mankind" and in Persian (which shares roots with Sanscrit) after Islam the equivalent "progenitor" Adam [aa-dam] is also commonly used to intend 'mankind'.

I wonder if this perspective is the path that leads to newspeak.

You know, that's an interesting question. "Newspeak" in 1984 describes two phenomena welded together: that language influences thought (Sapir-Worf), and that government has levers to influence language (which in the book look quite parochial compared to the modern information age). This casts language itself as a political battleground. Supposing we accept this perspective. Then surely it is imperative that we examine the language that we use very critically? Should we not fear the hidden mind-traps in Oldspeak as much as Newspeak? Might we already be unknowing slaves to some politically expedient worldview?

>In this worldview, society is made of men, and women are accessories.

>Pushback against the overwhelming backlog of casual male-dominating sexism that they deliberately exemplified is the entire reason for the "pushing the pendulum the other way" that they attack. Hence their point was immediately undermined.

The actual bigots are the ones crying bigot.

Also, what the sincere fuck. Please get your head out of the toilet bowl and get some fresh air.

Interestingly, the bias happened in the opposite direction from the one you're assuming.

We used to have the neutral "man" and masculine "wer-man" and feminine "wo-man". We still see that "wer-" prefix in the word "werewolf". So it's not that we took the masculine word and started using it as the default, but rather that we took the neutral word and added an assumed masculinity. In that context I see less of an issue with trying to reclaim the neutral-ness of "man" and "mankind".

[1] https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/08/the-word-ma...

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