PC

Or ’politically correct’. The worst of the lot is the ’gender sensitive’ crap that’s begun to ooze with increased regularity into written and spoken English. English has no neutral gender. In it’s place, we use ’he’. Ok, so you want to make a point about not all persons being male. Fine, use ’she’ every other time to even the balance out. Done? Good.

But for heaven’s sake, all this rubbish about ’wimmin’ and ’womyn’--what does that accomplish? So what if ’man’ and ’men’ are part of the word? That doesn’t exactly make me feel particularly oppressed, truth be told. What’s next, ’person-hole’? Gimme a break.

So what if ’man’ is part of a term? Rather than railing against that, wouldn’t it be easier to adopt it to the point that the word ’man’ IS neutral? Imagine, a few years down the line, the term Company Man, for instance, could apply to either a man or a woman with equal ease. And in the mean time, you can enjoy the surprise on people’s faces when they discover that ’he’ is a
’she’. That, in my opinion, would be a more concrete undermining of the sexist system. Attack from within--it’s much more effective.