attributive freshman

[Alison Murie]

>Note that men didn't come to this planet first (unless you accept the
>Adam and Eve story as evidence), but generic terms for human
>("man(n)" in Gmc., derivatives of "homo" in Romance) came to take on
>the [+ male] feature referentially, as with modern "man", "Mann",
>"homme", "hombre", "uomo",...  So it's not really an issue of
>temporal precedence fundamentally as much as cultural dominance.  Or
>so it can be argued.
>
>LH
 ~~~~~~~~~
I solved this little problem for the English-speaking world *years*ago in a
short essay  ("Man the Epicene") in a lit-micromag but the ungrateful world
has paid scant attention  & thus here we are in 2006 still plagued by  the
awkwardness of fumbling around for polite ways of being either inclusive or
exclusive of persons.
As I --- harrumph --- said then:
....." calls for someone to come up with a set of ungendered pronouns  and
nouns  so that the various dodges that have been employed in recent
years--since women's gripes  about the language of patriarchy  have become
more audible--can be abandoned. I think the reason these dodges have proved
so unsatisfactory is that the problem hasn't been properly identified. It's
not that we haven't got these undifferentiated nouns and pronouns.  We do:
man, mankind, he, him, his .  The problem is that /men don't have a set of
their very own/.
"Masculine man, perhaps feeling  a touch of the old Adam, got to thinking
of himself as the true type, from whose rib the subtype  was made, thence
the assumption of the title, *man,* for himself particularly....*woman*
would do for the other, feminine man."
I went on to suggest a set of nouns & pronouns for the masculine population
& invited other nominations, but the project never got wings............the
micromag disappeared, and here we were still saying "s/he" & "his or her"
&c.
Ah, well.
AM

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