On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 12:33:39AM +1000, Ben Burton wrote: > > > Interestingly enough, "humanity" has "man" in it too, but like > > "mankind", its origins have nothing to do with gender. > > FWIW, perception is not based on etymology. > > "chairman" is treated as gender-specific because it is easily read as > "chair" + "man", i.e., the man leading the organisation. Whether it > actually comes from the latin "manus" is irrelevant here -- those who > (at a conscious or subconscious level) picture what the word means are > not thinking back to its latin roots. They're decomposing it in the > same way that we decompose words all the time into smaller components. Heh heh. Heh heh. Heh heh. He said "manus". Heh heh. Come on, the only possible conclusion of this line of reasoning is that communication between two people is impossible. Absolutely anything you say can be misinterpreted in this way. The only possible conclusion is that this is a property of the reader, not the writer. Anybody who reads a piece of text and expects to be offended, will be. Anybody who reads the same piece of text and expects not to be offended, won't be. The contents of the text do not matter. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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