Sexism Again, Again.

These days, accessing my actual blogspot site is a chore.  It is on again being blocked in my neck of the Chinese woods.  I publish to the site using this online editor.  I know of comments on this blog because I receive email alerts about them.  Here is the comment that rare reader Danny has left on my Sexism Again posting:

 

Let me state for the record first and foremost: I have no problem saying man (as a verb) or chairman. I use them myself, so I'm not arguing that anyone who does use them is wrong. But I can't let you get away with an argument this absurd.

You don't see any distinction between staff/chair and personager? Please tell me you're playing dumb on purpose, because I don't want to contemplate the alternative.

Take your example of "fisher" -- it isn't new-fangled at all. A quick look shows that fisher has been in the English language since the 15th century, and I'm sure if I had access to a better dictionary, I could find older citations than that. Is it so terrible that the Canadian media is using a word that's been in the language for over 550 years? How is that as ridiculous as personager? Who is the one debasing language for political ends?

Incidentally, I should have linked to this in the last comment. I hope you can access Sino-Platonic Papers, because it had a fascinating article on sexism in Chinese, available as this pdf:

http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp074_Chinese_sexism.pdf

It's definitely worth a read, and it made me realize that there's a lot more to it than I thought. (I'd figured that when I came up with my list of all the negative characters that had "女," it was just a meaningless exercise for my amusement, but it turns out that I missed so much of it.)

I understand  your about using "manager" or "personager" although most of my Chinese students don't think too much about the origins of English words.  The "man" in manager or manual looks like the male word for the male of the human species.  I actually take the list of words from the article I cited, adding in manager to emphasize the point that the article wishes to make.  If "Language articulates consciousness" as that article suggests than of course I am right to use the example of personager.  Most people see "man" in manager.  I have heard of some feminists actually referring to themselves as womyn, changing the letter "a" or "e" to blot all traces of man in the word. 

The students have all thought that the distinctions made in the article were unimportant.  As I do since I satirize the need to change words according to one's political agenda.  The change from Fisherman to Fisher was noticeable especially since I lived in a coastal Canadian province where the fishing industry was very important.  People there complained because the change was deliberate and imposed by what they saw as the forces of P.C.  That is was an old word does legitimatize it being brought back.  The use of Fisher I would suspect originally fell out of fashion because it was ugly.  The adoption of Fisherman I don't think was part of a concerted plot of men to keep women down.