Quote:
Originally Posted by Uncle Robin
Thanks for your insightful comments as a linguist. The ferocity of many of the reactions to the initial post, most from "men of a certain age", does tend to support the correlation you mentioned. As a man of (more or less) that age myself, I have no problem in accepting that language changes and evolves, and when it does so in a direction that includes more and excludes less (or "fewer", for the pedantic prescriptivists), that's a good thing, a change to be embraced. I've even managed to train myself to say "crewed" and "uncrewed" instead of the older gender-restricted versions.  |
Should we edit all quotes to change language we find offensive regardless of all context? The basic rules of this forum don’t allow this just as an example, any quote of a members post can not be changed. You can of course chop it up however you like but any words you change must not be in the quote block. Might be more restrictive than this I’ve not tried delving deeper or pushing the issue.
I’ve no issue with language evolving and being adapted to be more inclusive. But for the nth time anyone spending 10 seconds looking at this ad should recognize from context that the ‘man’ here is used in place of‘human’, bonus insight if they recognize that it’s a quote from the late 19th century. Not as a slight against female authors as they are the majority of the selected sample by a wide margin, and are reviewed higher than their male counterparts.