The Word ‘Man’ was Originally Gender Neutral
Today I found out that the word ‘man’ was originally gender neutral, meaning more or less the same as the modern day word “person”. It wasn’t until about a thousand years ago that the word “man” started to refer to a male and it wasn’t until the late 20th century that it was almost exclusively used to refer to males.
Before “man” meant a male, the word “wer” or “wÇ£pmann” was commonly used to refer to “male human”. This word almost completely died out around the 1300s, but survives somewhat in words like “werewolf”, which literally means “man wolf”.
Women at the time were referred to as “wif” or “wÄ«fmann“, meaning “female human”. The latter “wifmann”, eventually evolved into the word “woman”, but retained its original meaning. The word “wif” itself eventually evolved into “wife”, with its meaning obviously being changed slightly.
Interestingly, the word ‘men’, meaning “to think” or “to have a cognitive mind”, was also gender neutral and connected to “man”, which meant “the thinker”. So we can see from that how “man” originally referred to all humans.
Largely due to the stigma that using the word “man” meaning “humans” is supposedly sexist, despite its original meaning, the use of the word “man” in that fashion has all but disappeared in the last 50-100 years, with it now only showing up in words like “human” and “mankind” as referring to both male and female. Â Even those instances still garners quite a bit of controversy in terms of being thought of as sexist, despite these words predating the point when “man” meant “male” only.
One interesting convention that was thought up in the early 1900s to deal with this issue of “man” coming to mean both male and female and also sometimes meaning males exclusively is, in literature, to do the following: when referring to humans, “man” should be capitalized as in “Man”; when referring to “man” as in “male”, it is to be left lower case. This convention was used in such literary works as “The Lord of the Rings” and was a key point in the prophecy concerning the Witch-king of Angmar: “no man can kill me”, meaning that according to the prophecy a woman, Eowyn, could because “man” in the prophecy was not capitalized.
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That’s what I was told in some university etymology class: “wer” as in werewolf meant a male human at one time.
“Woman” (according to the same class, is a contraction of something like “wife-man”, or “person who is wife”. I know this flies in the face of some theories involving women having wombs, but makes a lot more sense in terms of the evolution of words.
Yeah, I remember telling some people at work this because I use the word “man” all the time as gender neutral because it sure beats using the word “person”. They try to correct me to use it incorrectly but I just told them that if they knew how they could look it up in a dictionary – it’s usually in the No. 3 slot of the meaning.
So they did and the correctors were corrected. I learned a lot that day as later they laid me off.
Sorry for the job loss, secretagentman. I’ve had pretty much the same thing happen to me. The politically correct hate being shown up. On the other hand, we’re in good company. Winston Churchill was speaking in Parliament in the 1920s and Lady Astor called him down for using “Man” to mean “the human race”. He responded, “Grammarians will attest that Man embraces woman, unless otherwise stated in the text.”
If I could BEGIN to have the grasp and command of the language that Sir Winston had I’d be happy.
This reminds me of the historical meaning of the word “girl”, which originally meant a child of either sex. Also back in the 19th century blue was the colour of choice for female children, while pink was for boys.