Speaking of dissonant, as a woman it's always a bit difficult to figure out when "man" means "human" and when "man" means "not you, lady". "Men's room" = "not you, lady"; "man-years" = "of course I'm talking about you because I'm certainly not sexist; man means human, of course, except when it explicitly doesn't, like when you didn't have the right to vote because the right to vote was for all men who are created equal, haha".

Makes me think of Ismo and the word "ass": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU

As with many things that don't make much sense, it started from something more reasonable. Long, long ago the word 'man' unambiguously referred to all human beings, while 'woman' was used for females and 'werman' was used for males.

The forgotten sexism is that we began using 'men' to refer specifically to males, almost like they were the only people that mattered. It happened so long ago that it's been mostly forgotten that there even was another name.

Though, you still see vestiges of it in the language. That's the same wer- as in werewolf.

This is a good point, excuse a quibble: 'werman' did not seem to actually see usage in Old English, although 'wepman', meaning male human, did in Middle English.

I'm basing this on a discussion at Wiktionary:

> Their point, that Old English mann was not specifically male, is correct; but their example of the specifically male word is apparently mistaken.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:werman

And 'wepman' is documented on the Middle English Compendium.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dicti...

Thanks for pointing that out. I think Wiktionary is where I first heard the word, and I hadn't seen it was removed.

So, wer did mean male/husband and man did mean everyone. It's just that they weren't used together. I should probably also have noted that woman was 'wifman' back then. That one has more obvious descendants than the male version.

But this is something you do constantly as an English speaker. "Drinking" can mean any liquid, or just alcohol. Wood can be a material, or a forest. A bank can be a financial institution or the side of a river. A mouse can be a rodent or a computer peripheral. Does it really take conscious difficulty to figure out the intended meaning?

> Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country.

I don't want to be that person but Zoroastranism is the religion you should be comparing against -- it predates Islam by a good deal and developed alongside Farsi. And Zoroastranism does hold men and women to be equal. [1] Iran was actually a pretty liberal country prior to the Islamic Revolution (which was really more of a rebellion against American control).

[1] https://www.hinduwebsite.com/zoroastrianism/gender.asp

Iran has been Muslim for over 1300 years. Zoroastrians today are a tiny minority. It's a bit disingenuous to refer to the (brief, mainly urban) liberalism of the Pahlavi years in place of everything that came before or after.

> It is not painless: it is dissonant

The dissonance should be cause for reflection and growth. Why does the gendered version sound harmonious? What does that answer say about the society that evolved our language?

> and takes another syllable.

That's just silly. If typing three additional characters causes you pain, you shouldn't be writing comments on the internet in the first place.

Dev-hours, suggested below, also sounds harmonious. Employee hours sounds okay; it's cumbersome but it seems to project the concept of hourly pay directly into my mind. Hu-years and hu-hours are physically uncomfortable. Is there anything to learn about our society from that?

I think language is something we don't really understand. Maybe you have a more refined model, but any reflection upon this for me will be complete conjecture. Language is this ancient thing that evolved in concert with our minds, optimizing for some vast array of factors. Human intervention into that process seems to always go wrong, down to US attempts to fix the spelling.

It bothers me that speaking my dialect with common definitions is not good enough. Can we not just be charitable in our interpretations of others' speech? Why do I have to dedicate cognitive load to verifying that every possible interpretation of every word is acceptable with no expectation of others meeting me in the middle, even just as far as the dictionary definition? If people's feelings matter, why don't mine?

> If people's feelings matter, why don't mine?

Of course your feelings matter. I'm sure there are plenty of situations where your feelings are the most important factor to consider. But this is not one of those situations. Your feelings of minor inconvenience from being asked to use different words are less relevant than others' feelings of oppression from decades/centuries of societal biases.

This is long, and I apologize for that. I think I've said some important things though, and I'll ask you to do me the kindness of reading it. Thanks.

There's a notion in improv that when you respond only to the last thing that someone said, it's because you are in your own head and you're not listening. Additionally, it feels like you're talking down to me and others in this thread. Are those feelings invalid? It just seems like showing some respect to others should be a precursor to caring about whether a word could be misinterpreted as exclusionary, if the goal really is to make people feel less bad.

I personally devote a huge amount of time and energy to the feelings of others. I need to be doing it less, it degrades me. If I were to start caring about this on top of everything else, I would be completely dysfunctional. You call it a minor inconvenience, but if I were to accept that this is worth doing, I'd implicitly be agreeing to a thousand minor inconveniences, overthinking everything I say even more than I already do (this is a fifth draft, and look how long it has been made so I can feel I'm communicating effectively), and inevitably retreating altogether from social interactions that already give me anxiety.

Back to the subject at hand. What the word 'man' as in 'mankind', 'manpower', or 'man-hours' means to me is a dehumanized, de-individualised, notion of genetic humans working towards some end. This is a _very_ useful construct for me. A person is something else, a human individual. It is impossible for me to consider a single person, let alone thousands. People have 86 billion neurons of uncompressable complexity, and I've only got 86 billion of my own to try and grok that. This is also an incredibly useful construct for me. I can't just swap one for the other, it would be a significant long term effort to rewire all of the associations.

A better solution would be a new word to take the place of 'man' there. 'Man' already does the job, but I'm sure there are other prefixes in english that also mean human. I don't think it's a material issue, so I'm not going to devote energy to solving it. But if someone is going to tell me how to talk, they can afford to make the damn effort to find a suitable alternative instead of forcing me to adapt to the first thing that comes to mind. And when it is pointed out that it doesn't work, and it doesn't sound right, they could maybe try to figure out what is wrong with their solution, rather than assuming I'm a closed-minded closeted sexist. I don't know.

>Take it from a trans person, that is _not_ what most of us are asking for.

statements like this are not useful for building understanding.

rather than speaking in negatives and stating what it is that you're not looking to achieve, tell us what is being sought.

Being disconnected from the struggle/lifestyle/issue, I do not know what to take from your statement.

What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?

For what it's worth, I already use 'dev-hours', but not from any gender/rights perspective, it just sounds better and correlates the specific industry to the metric. It's also about the same amount of verbal effort as 'man-hours', so the change was easy.

> What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?

We're asking to simply feel included (this includes women as well as trans people; I'm both). When so much of your life is being told you don't belong or that people like you don't / shouldn't exist, it's a big deal. It's 1) more accurate and 2) more reflective of the wide variety of experiences a person can have. I'm not being glib here, but of course the need for gender neutral language seems irrelevant: it is to you because you were already included. It's doubly important in heavily male-dominated industries.

I, too, prefer using "dev" or "employee" in place of "man" in these cases simply because it's more accurate. But it's really not a lot of effort and it actually means something when someone corrects themselves because it's basically "wow I feel seen and like I have a place here". When you've never seen someone like you in a position of success above you because you're one of the first, it really, really matters to feel accepted in any way you can.

Like, you don't have to do it. But these days it really does sound a bit anachronistic to use "man-hours" -- language changes along with the culture and it always has.

I'm totally with you on the inclusion part, everyone in a diverse team needs to feel included.

However, on the solution part, if you say dev-hours, I as a designer would have a huge problem :-), or even as a PM I would have same problem. 'Employee' comes close, but then it precludes estimating for consultants, freelancers etc. 'Person Hours' does not seem to have any of above problems, but then as mentioned it is awkward to use.

Well, maybe perfect solution does not exist, or maybe the perfect solution is being more accepting - accepting gender diversity AND also accepting that many times things that we do is out of laziness or choosing easier path or just out of habit - people in professional work environment do not do things with ill intention.

There is no ill intention behind using certain phrase and doing so does not spread any harmful stuff around.

I do hope you know that it’s never intentional. I’m definitely not excluding any gender when I think of the concept of “man hours”—it’s just an abbreviation for “human” to me. I try to use gender neutral language where ever I can, whenever I think of it... I end my meetings with “thanks everyone” rather than “thanks guys”, even though “guys” just means people to me. But it can be stressful to always have to worry about the different intentions people can put behind words, even if none are meant. Basically I think trying to use more gender neutral language is a great thing, but we also shouldn’t criticize it every time it’s seen. I think it’s fair to assume we all have good intentions and that we’re not secretly sexist.