![]() The Screen Actors Guild Awards honour the best male actor and best female actor, while the Oscars go to best actors and actresses. ![]() Still, we need only look at acting awards to see how divided the usage is. For how much longer? One Los Angeles Times article says that "over the last decade or so, most thespians of the female persuasion now refer to themselves as actors, not actresses" (see ). Many feminine forms, including authoress, poetess and aviatrix, have exited current English, but actress is one of a few to hang on. Actress is a feminine form of actor actor refers to either sex. It means a person of either sex who is with a woman giving birth. Midwife is a Middle English combination of the Old English mid (with) and wif (woman). Words such as manufacture, manipulate, manual and manuscript come from manus, the Latin for "hand" (making manufactured another option for man-made in question 2). ![]() Don’t assume that all terms that contain man derive from the word man. Try fabricated, machine-made, artificial, factory-produced, synthetic. There are many synonyms that allow for the possibility that a woman had a hand in making the thing. Above all, respect the official job title if there is one: if an organization elects a Chair of the Board, consistently refer to that person as chair. But if you know and want to specify the sex of the person holding the position, chairman or chairwoman may be fine. When referring to the position in the abstract, use the gender-neutral chair or chairperson. To measure your GQ (gender quotient), decide which of the following words you would change, in most circumstances, to a gender-neutral alternative. Putting that requirement into practice means knowing which words to replace and which to leave alone. To sidestep the perceived bias, not to mention lack of logic, that results from referring to people as men in modern English, government bodies, companies, publishers and academic institutions have made gender-neutral vocabulary a requirement. As Editing Canadian English ( 2nd ed., 2000) notes: "Research has confirmed what was long suspected: when they hear or read the generic man, people form mental pictures of males." Anyone who doubts this should consider this oft-cited (though fictitious) title of a medical paper: "Development of the uterus in rats, guinea pigs, and men." ![]() Such terms don’t refer exclusively to men, the critics say they refer to both sexes, because that’s what man used to mean.Ĭomforting as this argument may be to some, it skips over the fact that in our time the male meaning of man outweighs any other. They will trot out the dual-sex meaning of man to defend all manner of gender-biased terms, including businessman, fireman, mailman, mankind. Now the newer meaning is the predominant one.Ĭritics of gender-neutral usage-those for whom the prospect of changing workman to worker is a needless if not infuriating restriction of personal freedom, in a league with obeying "no smoking" signs or yielding to pedestrians-love this history. Thus, for a time man carried two meanings: the newer one (male human beings) and the older one (all human beings). Around the late thirteenth century, wer fell out of use (though as horror fans know, we kept werewolf) and man took its place. The sex-differentiated terms were wer and wif, for males and females respectively. In Old English man meant a human being, male or female. Read up on gender-neutral English and you’re bound to run into the history of the word man.
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