Oh, for sure. I didn't mean to suggest it's a common or respected belief, only that there are some who support it. (and probably more who use examples of it in

Oh, for sure. I didn't mean to suggest it's a common or respected belief, only that there are some who support it. (and probably more who use examples of it in bad faith arguments presuming that such groups exist in larger numbers, e.g. "look at those crazy feminists!") > If we want English to be more gender-neutral, we could revert to werman, wifman and man. There's a part of me that loves this idea, even if I recognize the absurdity of suggesting it. I guess it's made more sense to me than trying to replace a large portion of English vocab en masse, like all the vocational terms ending in "-man". A curious example of a Germanic cousin of English that underwent the same "masculinization" of the word man but "came back" is Swedish, where the word "man" means "adult male", but is also used as a neuter pronoun meaning "generic person" (usually translated as "one" in English). As far as I know the other Nordic languages didn't develop this usage, but I'm less familiar with them.