Yesterday's 'Man'

Man is complex, wouldn’t you say? Or does that sort of talk make you spit tacks? However, it’s not the human condition that rankles many folk, but the very word “man”.

To see where you stand, try these questions: Who makes up mankind? Who makes manmade products? What do man-eating crocodiles devour? Whom do we mean by the everyman? Would you respond man, or rather men? Your answer is no longer a matter of taste and style. For all use of the m-word is increasingly political, and increasingly policed.

This is nothing new, of course. For generations, society has made a linguistic stand against the “man”. Seventy-five years ago, when Winston Churchill was generalising about “man” in the House of Commons, Edith Summerskill trenchantly interjected “and woman”. Knocked off his hobby-horse, the PM resorted to the stock answer that “man embraces woman, unless the contrary appears in the context.”

Unhappily phrased, yes, but undoubtedly sound. And 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for man” was thought by some to be a linguistic leap in the wrong direction for humankind. Even in the academic world, the leading anthropological journal Man dispensed with its unwelcome title as long ago as 1995.

We have long been accustomed to job titles changing when they became unisex, first to a female-gendered then to an ungendered alternative: policeman, policewoman, police officer; fireman, firewoman, firefighter; chairman, chairwoman, chair. But things have ratcheted up in recent years. In trailblazing America, “freshman” is being replaced with “first year”, while “manhole” becomes the “maintenance hole”.

In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — whiter than white on all woke issues — valiantly corrected a woman for her public malapropism of “mankind”. Lawyers worldwide are regularly pressed to rebrand crimes as “personslaughter”. Even “woman” has seen orthographic rebranding — as “womxn” or “womyn” — to banish its offending syllable.

Meanwhile “man” has a new lease of life as a pejorative prefix — manspreading, mansplaining, manterrupting and all manner of portmanteaux (or should that be “manbags”?)

For most of its existence, “man” has been an ungendered term. Its actual etymology is unknown: perhaps it had something to with thinking, having hands, or suffering (unlike the gods) the inconvenience of death. In Old English, “mann” was a human of either sex; as late as the sixteenth century, it was not heresy for John Kinge to preach that “the Lord had but one paire of men in paradise.”

The male-specific term was “wer”, the female “wif”. While the latter acquired a more restricted role, Modern English woman derives from wifman (female-person). To spell it otherwise, then, is to erase species not gender. The fate of “wer”, by contrast, was lycanthropic exile as a werewolf. Throughout an age when the typical agent was so often male, the general term man gradually ousted “wer” and its synonym “waepman” (weapon-person).

The present problem is clear enough: as with dogs and deer and foxes, no noun exists to describe adult males distinctly. The fashionable solution, at least for humans, is to restrict “man” to the role the patriarchy presumed. In an age of equality, the argument runs, why use a gendered term “man” for an indefinite, ungendered subject, such as the world’s population? Let’s just say “humankind” and have done with it. That may seem fair enough, but its consequences are regressive and paradoxically sexist.

If, for instance, a woman in Cardiff brokers a deal, do we have a Welshwoman acting as the middlewoman? Should a seamstress be proud of her workwomanship or — leaving gender out of it — her craftspersonship? Should we be talking of countrywomen, of fisherpersons, of ombudspeople? Aren’t these clunky neologisms offensive?

Far from removing assumptions about the genders in play, they actually declare non-maleness by their very novelty. It seems a more progressive idea to turn this practice on its head. Rather than limiting “man” to men, thus enshrining the historic male dominance of Anglophone societies, could we not transcend that fact by reasserting neutral parity? Cannot “man” be revivified in its inclusive, ungendered role?

Unlike most languages, English is fortunate to lack grammatical gender: “everyman” literally is neuter. If “man” regains its universality, there’s scope for finding something specifically masculine to parallel “woman”. Perhaps “male” — already common enough in news reporting — has the best CV on offer?

With all the hysteria and calling-out, it’s worth reminding ourselves that not all etymological journeys are tales of patriarchal conquest. Human appears three-fifths “man”, but only the first three letters have anything to do with mankind.

Nor is female actually two-thirds “male”: it comes from Latin femella (“little woman”) but in the mediaeval period organically came to rhyme with “male”. In the case of “girl”, the reverse occurred: it originally meant a child of either gender, but the rise of the term “boy” (perhaps originally a slang term for servant) came to gender the general term.

Our linguistic siblings in Germany have found — of course — a more practical compromise: Mensch is man, Mann is a man, and man is a most useful indefinite pronoun (without the pretensions of English “one”). In fact, curiously enough, in several urban communities of Britain “man” has re-emerged to play an identical role: “man do what man can” or “man can’t fool me”.

Is grime pronominally ahead of its time? Perhaps if the world’s word-police could give a fair hearing to our language’s long and rich history, there’ll be space for “man” to enjoy a longer span of human life, on and off the streets.