A rare reader (Danny who taught at our school a few years ago)left a comment on my posting about Sexism. Because, this site is being blocked in China (I have an offline editor that still lets me publish to it), I can't reply to him in the proper place. Here is what he said:
Uh, "manager" ultimately comes from the Latin "manus," meaning hand. It has nothing to do with man. So what the hell are you talking about with "personager"? As far as I can tell, you invented that in order to ridicule some opponent that doesn't actually exist, or perhaps you listed it from a satire that does the same thing. I suppose I should congratulate you on vanquishing this non-existent opponent. Well done!
Anyway, when I taught that class, in addition to using some magazine pictures, I also asked students to compare 安 and 男. If you really follow all the different words that have "女" in it, there really are a lot of sexist etymologies in Chinese.
Here is my reply:
The personager was a ridiculing of an actual phenomenon which you can find here. I believe this site is legitimate. I have used many of its examples in class as well as my invention 'personager". And I know for a fact that in British Columbia, Canada, you will hear the media use the awkward sounding word "fisher" instead of "fisherman" (you can see this in the article linked) which is as ridiculous as my invention of personager, at least to my thinking anyway.
The debasing of the language for political purposes is a real phenomenon.
I have had a few students tell me about some examples of "sexist" etymologies in Chinese but not as many as I would like to get some conversation going.
1 comment:
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.)
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