It's an age-old, first-world problem: how do you address a woman who chairs a meeting? 'Chairperson'? 'Chairwoman'? You've heard 'Madam Chairman' somewhere but that can't be right, can it? And surely 'Chair' is the seat itself?
The correct answer, from a historic standpoint at least, is 'Chairman'. This is because the word 'man' originally meant 'human being', and had nothing to do with gender. In Old English, mann was used as we now use 'person'. A female man was a wifmann, and a male was a wermann. Over time, wifmann was shortened to 'woman', while wermann became simply 'man'. This left ‘man’ with the twin meanings of 'person' and 'male person', sowing the seeds of today's confusion.
This dual meaning lasted hundreds of years, with context often the only clue. Until recently, this was seldom a problem: in a world where all dustmen, doormen and firemen were male, it didn't matter which meaning was implied. Things only changed when these jobs became open to women. Because the word 'man' could mean a male human, people began treating it as if it always did. And so the die was cast.
The original, genderless meaning of 'man' lives on in words such as 'mankind' and 'manslaughter'. There is, therefore, nothing wrong with continuing to use these words. Amending 'mankind' to 'humankind' is a linguistic nonsense: 'mankind' comes from Old English mancynn, with cynn being the old spelling of 'kin'. 'Human' comes from the Roman word humanus, which was unknown in Old English and would never have been used together with cynn.
The prefix wif- has, of course, given us the modern word 'wife', but it also retains its meaning of 'woman' in words such as 'fishwife' and 'midwife', neither of which imply the woman is married.
The male prefix wer- crops up in Old English words such as wergeld - the amount of gold to be paid in compensation if a man were to be unlawfully killed. In modern English, however, it shows up only in 'werewolf'. As such, any female werewolves out there may wish to rebrand themselves as 'wifewolves'. You read it here first.
Like the blog? Buy the book.
Get it below from Amazon.