Washington state gets rid of sexist language

Source

Am I the only one who finds this to be extremely stupid? Especially considering how the "man" in almost all of the words mentioned in the article is a shortening of "human" and not referring to the sex. Next thing we know, human will be changed too. I'm honestly not seeing how this can bring gender equality.

 

I agree this is stupid. There are so many words with man/boy in them that don't even have anything to do with the male half of gender.

 

I don't find it stupid, I just find it extremely minimal and pointless, though I do kind of support this type of thing. I like the idea of gender neutrality, to a point, in legal documentation since gender can be a defining factor on the information in the document. But outside of that, it seems ridiculously superfluous.

One of the things I find annoying about sexist claims is that words are subjected to scrutiny that are not exclusively gender centric. I hear postman, I think of the title as someone who delivers the post to my house, not specifically a man delivering to my house. More in depth, I find 'man' to be an acceptable middle ground for both genders, since 'man' and 'woman' both share the common 'man' term within the gender identification name. Unless the specific prefix of 'wo' is needed for whatever reason, 'man' by itself is a shorthand I can agree with.

I personally use the term 'man' in the context of 'human' or 'humanity' when speaking or writing, and I never contribute it to mean the male gender. When I mean the make specifically I say 'that man', 'a man', 'men', etc. If I am referring to a specific individual or group with the use of man, then that's what I mean to be male.

It's just a little out of hand at times how much we are told to be corrected in problems a small few see as a problem. But people cave in because they don't want to be labelled as racist, sexist, or just generally offensive.

 

While it's nice that people are trying to get rid of things that are gender-biased, I'm not entirely sure they were on the right track with this. Sure you can change the words, but first of all, how long till anyone even decides to speak like that? It's not something that can just be changed overnight, and from the sounds of it, they might as well give out a piece of paper to everyone in the state, have them learn the differences, and expect them to learn how to say these things instead. Either way, I really don't see how this is going to have any impact on anything.

 

I heard a few years ago of someone who wanted to change the spelling to womyn or something like that

 

It's not like they're expecting everyone to suddenly speak differently. Reading the article, it only mentions changing the language used within the law, which can be useful as PaW mentioned, to prevent confusion due to legalese.

However, in terms of fighting the good fight for women/feminists, I'd have to say that this doesn't particularly help anyone lol. And, as people in this thread have said, pointless, contrived, PC-gone-mad, busywork comes to mind.

EDIT:

From what I've seen of some hardcore feminists, this is the norm