The Etymology of Man
To Boldly Go Where No Homo Sapiens Has Gone Before
When Star Trek launched in 1966, Captain Kirk pledged that the Enterprise would “boldly go where no man has gone before.”
When Star Trek: The Next Generation launched in 1987, the pledge was updated to reflect modern sensibilities. Now Captain Picard was leading the Enterprise places where “no one” had gone before. Captain Picard did not want to exclude his female crew from their journey.
But in 2020, the entire enterprise (so as to speak) has to be damned as colonialist, imperialist, and worse: Wherever the U.S.S. Enterprise went, there were alien beings there. Do all these magnificent life forms count as ‘no one’? You can’t discover ‘new life and new civilizations’ if there’s ‘no one’ there.
The writers would have done better to stick with “no man”.
Why? Let’s look at historical usage. The word man is first attested in Old English to around 800 AD and it meant “person” or “human being”; it was gender neutral.
Back in the day, the gendered term for male was originally wer, often combined with man to form wereman. Wer dropped out of usage around 1400 AD, but its meaning lingers in the contemporary word “werewolf.” The original gendered term for female was wif, and it’s still with us in the form of the contemporary words “wife” and “woman”. (The exact etymology was wifman in Early Old English, leading to wiman in Late Old English, and to woman thereafter.)
When wer slipped out of usage - perhaps because it sounded too much like the already common were, where and we’re - man absorbed the meaning of male person, but it retained its original meaning for another 1,100 years. Not until the 1970s did woke no-good-nicks decide that this ancient and mighty word was suddenly offensive. In the last 50 years, we have invalidated over a millennium of English speech.
In giving up the word man as gendered neutral, we’ve given up a lot. “Mankind.” “The descent of man.” “The origin of man.” “Fireman, policeman, workman, crewman, airman, boatman, chairman.” “Manning the ship, manning battlestations.” “Workmanship.” “Marksmanship.” Beautiful, elegant, delightful turns of phrase, easy to say, vigorous in their Anglo-Saxon might, all sacrificed on the altar of foolish political correctness. Even delightful slang such as “my man” “what’s up man” and “The Man” must be cast aside.
What is to be done? Sadly there’s no viable substitute for man. Person nowadays is used to include legal entities (such as corporations) and certainly would encompass artificial intelligences such as C3PO, aliens such as Klingons, or fantasy races such as Elves. Being two syllables, it also sounds terrible: Chairperson? Airperson? Markspersonship? Horrid. The French Academy would guillotine someone who similarly butchered their romantic tongue.
Human doesn’t work, either. First, human actually means “of man”; that’s why we need the word “human being.” Second, because of sensitive and altruistic word-variants such as humanity, humanities, humane, humanitarian, and humanist, it loses a lot of the connotation of man. No one can human the battle stations and actually expect to have any military effectiveness. If someone tried to teach me markshumanship I’d ask them to put the gun down for their own safety.
Rather than give up the gender neutral man, I propose we bring back the gender-specific wereman. Who doesn’t want to be a wereman? If I’m a wereman I’m halfway to being a werewolf, and since I haven’t had a haircut since February, I look the part. If wereman doesn’t work, we could develop an alternative — perhaps a re-purposing of yeoman or gentleman, since those words are little-used nowadays. Really, the instances where we need to specify “male human being” are very few, while the instances where we would like to use generic “human being” are manifold.
Imagine! Mankind could prosper. Man could be a rational and social animal. If The Man tried to keep us down, we could man the guns to resist, then convene a parliament headed by a chairman to help us decide what to do next. Our neighbor-hoods could be defended by policemen and firemen again, and we could give Medals of Honor to the brave men who died in our wars without causing anybody to feel excluded.
And for that, what - we have to go to the wereman’s room and we have to have wereman’s sports and woman’s sports? This is a small, small sacrifice.
It’s time to man up, English speakers.