The English suffix -man means “one who does something”. It came into English from Old Germanic via Anglo-Saxon, where it meant the same thing. For example, in Anglo-Saxon, a waepman was a husband and a wifman was a wife.
The word or suffix has always had the dual meaning of either adult male or someone of unspecified gender. In Old English, the words wer (from where we get werewolf) and wif were used to refer specifically to a man or woman.
The word has persisted in the same usage in modern German, eg. Landsmann = compatriot, Mannschaft = team and also as the third person pronoun man, meaning one, as in “from the hill, one can see the entire town”. The English plural men derives from the German plural Männer (pron. menner).
This is why in modern English, we say batsman, chairman and so on.
Left wing feminists have tried to coin new words to counteract the perceived gender bias. Thus, we have batter and chairwoman, chairperson or simply chair.
If you want to replace the Germanic ending with a French one and say batter, then the batsman should stand in the French cricket stance. Chairwoman is just plain ugly. Chairperson is both ugly and ridiculous. Chair does not generalise eg. fire, police.
Given the patriarchal nature of Indo European societies, it is probably true that the word which can mean adult male and also refer to a person in more generality is evidence of deeply ingrained sexism within the culture. If used without knowledge of its etymology, it is also probable that this could have a psychological effect of reinforcing gender stereotyping and the notion of the superior suitability of men for certain roles. Perhaps there is such a subtle psychological effect, even with an understanding of the word’s history.
On the subject of “history”, I recently heard an ignorant bitch with a bee in her bonnet claiming this word as a shining example of inbuilt linguistic gender bias because it means “his story”. This ridiculous non-example surfaces every now and then amongst people who value diatribe and polemic over research and education.
I interjected that it is remarkable that modern English was spoken by the ancient Greeks, died out, then re-evolved in identical form two and a half thousand years later, which must be the case for Heroditus of Halicarnussus to have written his Histories, if that is indeed the meaning of the word.
Of course, history does not mean “his story”. It cannot, because it came into English from the ancient Greek ιστορειν (historein = to enquire). Thus, Heroditus’ Histories were the results of his “enquiries” during his extensive travels.
So, if we don’t want to even subconsciously reinforce gender inequality, what should we say when referring to a woman’s (or even a man’s) role?
Since language is constantly evolving, there is no “correct” answer if multiple synonyms are in current usage, even if the different words are not exactly synonyms because they convey the same intended meaning on an operational level, but different meanings in terms of a world view. It depends on your politics. However, the situation is not so equivocal as different people use different expressions, so freely substitute them because it doesn’t matter. It does matter, because each choice of either batsman or batter, chairman or chairwoman or chair represents a political viewpoint which is strongly opposed to the alternative.
It is not necessary to change a word to alter its meaning. Many words alter their meaning naturally over time. For example, egregious used to mean remarkable or distinguished in the sense of great importance, hence Gauss’ Theorema Egregium in differential geometry. Now it means remarkable or distinguished in the sense of outstandingly bad or wicked eg. an egregious lie. Meanings of words can also be deliberately changed by certain groups claiming them, for example gay and queer.
One possible approach is to educate people on the true meanings of such charged words as man. Have a campaign to preserve some of the cultural history of our language within our modern tongue, while at the same time using that education to claim the meanings of the words as their intended ones, but in a modern social context.
The history of languages is important. It tells us about the history of cultures. Thus, we would educate schoolchildren that the suffix -man does not mean a man, but rather a person who does a particular task. It would in fact be more elucidating to an open mind to be told the history of the word, to have a discussion of the then current cultural views of gender roles, to compare them with our different views today and to perhaps finish with some positive reinforcement that if we use -man at the end of a word, it means either a male or female, because anyone can perform that role.
The left would have it that since man has the dual meaning of adult male and an operant of unspecified gender, this is an example of culturally ingrained sexism, reinforced via language. This device to entrench privilege must be removed from the language by a direct, concerted campaign to use “politically correct” alternative words. Change the language, change the set of expressions available to parse thought, change the culture. There are some on the left who would also argue that the very wish to keep using -man in its current form is evidence of the user attempting to maintain some inherited privilege.
That’s the left for you: rather than educating people about the history of certain words and then reinterpreting their meanings in a modern, pluralist social context via free and open discussion, we must assert a new set of politically correct words and expunge the others from the language, so that people will not be able to conceive of the wrong ideas which they represented.
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?... Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
- George Orwell, 1984
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