Wednesday - August 27, 2008

AN EXCELLANT FOLLOWUP TO YESTERDAY’S POST ON THE SUBJECT OF THINGS BEYOND STUPID.

Razor-blading every last man in the book
By Christopher Howse
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 27/08/2008

Last week I delightedly ripped open a parcel from Amazon to reveal The Art of Manhole Covers in New York City by Diana Stuart. These fine cast-iron objects have every right to be celebrated, but it is notable that the author felt obliged in her foreword to apologise for the word manhole.

She just couldn’t use any other, like the unfortunate character in Nineteen Eighty-Four who was given the job of rewriting Kipling and kept in “God” because he couldn’t think of any other rhyme.

Now Chichester District Council, as we reported yesterday, has strongly advised against the use of the phrase “man in the street” lest women be offended by not being in the street too.

This is no silly story like the banning of Baa Baa Black Sheep. It reflects a conviction that it is wrong to use man to mean “human” - morally wrong, like wife-beating.

“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,” says the Bible. Not any more, it doesn’t. “Blessed are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked,” says the Church of England’s Common Worship, which replaces the Book of Common Prayer in churches of the kind that use stacking chairs instead of pews.

The blessed man has gone the way of the dustman ("My old person’s a dust person"), the postman, the policeman and the fireman.

It’s funny how we fall out of sexism into militarism, being recommended (though not in this newspaper) to say fire-fighter instead of fireman. Chichester wants that man in the street to be replaced by general public, another warmonger.

Even dear old Minnie Haskins’s line “I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year” has been gender-reassigned on many an internet site to “the one who stood”. What next?

Perhaps the most famous bungled quotation in history, Neil Armstrong’s “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” How would you like future schoolbooks to put that? “That’s one small step for me; one giant leap for us”? Sounds more like The Two Ronnies.

How did we get into this mess? The Oxford English Dictionary has spent the past two decades revising its entry for man. The article in the 20-volume dictionary now runs to 34,000 words.

No mannish aspect has been left unturned: axe-man, porkman, jazzman, beadsman, woodsman. You could count a whole orchard of cherries with them.

The dictionary now adds an explanatory note. “Man was considered until the 20th century to include women by implication,” it says. “It is now frequently understood to exclude women, and is therefore avoided by many people.”

(but just who is it who “understands” it to EXCLUDE women? Before people were taught, or should that be indoctrinated, to think in those terms?  I don’t think anyone ever thought in those terms.  But as I already have pointed out, it’s a construct of the left and nobody fought them on the issues, the issues being thought themselves to be far too silly to bother with, and so we all lost to the left by default. And so it continues.)

By many people? How many people? Who does Tammy Wynette stand by? Who broke the bank at Monte Carlo? Who knew too much? James Stewart was the What from Laramie? Spider-What? Batwhat?

It goes back a long way. English lacks the distinction of Latin homo (human) versus vir (person with willy). So from the time of the Lindisfarne Gospels (those bright pages from the Dark Ages, finished by the year 721), we have happily used man to mean “person” (as the Germans do today).

Someone will have to go over the illuminated parchment pages with a razor-blade scraping every man out again.

That, metaphorically, has been the effect of the man-ban campaign of the past generation. The aim was partly to explode the fallacy of seeing women as defective men.

Just as important was the struggle to change consciousness, so that every time man popped up, the hearer should think sorrowfully of injustice to women. The campaign has changed the English language, making the use of man even more offensive.

If we remake our language, literature risks being misunderstood. So when Hamlet exclaims: “What a piece of work is a man!” Shakespeare is made to sound like a sexist instead of a Renaissance humanist. That is a pity.

http://tinyurl.com/6l4jj9

Political Correctness is more than just silliness and sophistry. The intention is to assault Western culture from all sides so as to depict it as racist, misogynistic, discriminatory, war-mongering, etc. It is an assault on individualism and above all, reason, which is the bedrock of Western culture.

All part of the post-modernist, hard-left agenda.

Posted by Capitalist on August 27, 2008 11:16 AM

The people that come up with such stupid PC correct dogma are of course, being paid by the public that have more sense and they will also enjoy very generous pensions. Britain seriously needs rescuing from these idiots but who will do it?
I wish that I could spend just half an hour with the person who thought this one up.
Posted by Clive on August 27, 2008 11:14 AM

Posted by Drew458     on 08/27/2008 at 09:09 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • UK •  
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