Androgynous Language for a S exual Species

In old Anglo-Saxon a Wifmann was female and a Wermann was male. Wif gave us wife and Wifmann was event ually corrupted into wi'man and finally woman over time . P erhaps due to laziness, we seem to have lost our W er and refer now to males simply as man and men.

Mann or Monn s imply m eant person, as in the Jamaican "What's Up Monn?"

Washington State is becoming Androgynous

For the past six yea rs Washington has been neutering their langu age in use by the state. Da irymen have become dairy farmers, freshman are now first-year students , eve n sillier Ombudsm en are now Ombuds . I suppose the heav ier one's are O mbuds while the thinner among them are now Ombudlites. They continu e to strug gle with coming up with appropriate replacements for terms like manhole (utility hole), penmanship (now simply hand writing), and a term like man's past becomes the somewhat cl unky humankind's past.

Gi t Yer Language "Fixed"!

The obvious solution to the feminist hang-up would have been to reinstall the word werman, because wer and its local variations and derivations are still a common indicator of the male gender in all Germanic languages: werewolf in English, Wehrmacht (male power, army) in German, weergeld (a former conscription-tax) in Dutch, etc, are some, still current, examples.



If our feminists hadn't been so ignorant they would have insisted on reintroducing werman as a male indicator, rather than bastardising the English language with the introduction of neo-logisms such as chairwoman, chairperson, wimmen, etc.



Matt Br ue kers

As indicated by the i llustration for this post, you can change the words, you can't change the facts.

Personally my favorite term thu s far for s /he is the quite puzzling "Mixter" ... as in Hey Mixter, can you spare a dime?