Made In America - Bill Bryson [229]
Unfortunately, there remains in English a large body of gender-specific terms – gamesmanship, busman’s holiday, manhole, freshman, fisherman, manslaughter, manmade, first baseman, and others beyond counting – that are far less susceptible to modification. Maggio notes that many such ‘man’ words are in fact unexceptionable because their etymology is unconnected to man the male. Manacle, manicure and manufacture, for example, come from the Latin for hand, and thus are only coincidentally ‘sexist’.19 Tallboy similarly passes muster because the closing syllable comes from the French for wood, ‘bois’. But in many scores of others the link with gender is explicit and irrefutable.
This poses two problems. First there is the consideration that although many gender-based words do admit of alternatives mail carrier for mailman, flight attendant for stewardess – for many others the suggested replacements are ambiguous, unfamiliar, or clumsy, and often all three. No matter how you approach them, utility access hole and sewer hole do not offer the immediacy of recognition that manhole does. Gamestership is not a comfortable replacement for gamesmanship. Frosh, frosher, novice, newcomer, greenhorn, tenderfoot and the other many proposed variants for freshman suffer from either excessive coyness or uncertain comprehensibility.20
That is not to say that this must always be so. Twenty years ago, chair for chairman sounded laughable to most people. Ms, if not absurd, was certainly contentious. Most newspapers adopted it only fitfully and over the protests of white-haired men in visors. Today, both appear routinely in publications throughout the English-speaking world and no one thinks anything of it. There is no reason that gamester-ship and frosh and sewer hole should not equally take up a neutral position in the language. But these things take time. Ms was coined as far back as 1949, but most people had never heard of it, much less begun to use it, until some twenty years later.
More pertinently there is the question of whether such words can always be legitimately termed sexist. Surely the notion that one must investigate a word’s etymology before deciding whether it is permissible suggests that there is something inadequate in this approach. I would submit (though I concede that I can sometimes feel the ice shifting beneath my feet) that just as ‘man’ is not sexist in manipulate or mandible so it is not in any meaningful sense sexist in manhole or Walkman or gamesmanship.
A word that imparts no overt sense of gender – that doesn’t say, ‘Look, this is a word for guys only’ – is effectively neuter. Words after all have only the meanings we give them. Piss is infra dig in polite company not because there is something intrinsically shocking in that particular arrangement of letters but because of the associations with which we have endowed the word. Surely it is excessive to regard a word as ipso facto objectionable because of the historical background of a syllable embedded in it, particularly when that word does not fire gender-sensitive synapses in most people’s minds.
My point becomes somewhat clearer, I hope, when we look at what I think is the greatest weakness of the bias-free usage movement – namely, that often it doesn’t know where to stop. The admirable urge to rid the language of its capacity to harm can lead to a zealousness that is little short of patronizing. Maggio, for instance, cautions us not to ‘use lefthanded metaphorically; it perpetuates subtle