Man on!

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:57 AM -0500 4/20/01, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>A few years ago, my daughter was playing on the Ball State Women's
>Soccer team.  This group of young college-age women,
>gender-sensitive all, regularly used a soccer term as a warning when
>the player handling the ball was about to be attacked by an opposing
>player.  The practice is to yell "Man on!" to the ball handler.  No
>one seemed bothered by this.  My guess is that the cry has to be
>short, loud, and clear, and that the game situation has precedence
>of gender-sensitivity.  Any thoughts on this?
>
>Herb

Women's basketball players and coaches regularly refer to
"man-on-man" (or hypocoristically "man") defenses, never so far as I
know "woman-to-woman".  This is non-specific, of course, and I recall
noticing that when the UConn women's coach referred to one of his
players as the team's "go-to guy", it was an environment in which
"man" would have sounded very peculiar.  (Both the coach and his
players regularly refer to the women players as "(the) guys", but in
plural uses; the above is one of the few cases I have on record when
the singular was employed, faute de mieux.)

larry