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From: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Vigorous Spelling Error
Message-ID: <238@spar.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 9-May-85 08:13:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: spar.238
Posted: Thu May  9 08:13:22 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 11-May-85 09:10:07 EDT
References: <385@ttidcc.UUCP> <305@mhuxr.UUCP> <327@h-sc1.UUCP>
Reply-To: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA
Lines: 48

>I beg to (vigorously) disagree. There are much less awkward, and more
>descriptive expressions, such as "fire fighter", "letter carrier" or "police
>officer", which are the *real* expressions for "fireman", "postman" or
>"policeman".  Such shorthand was acceptable when these ocupations were all
>male.  Now that this is no longer the case, they will pretty much stop
>existing.
>--Marcel Simon

    Your suggestion is reasonable for those professions and titles that are
    fortunate enough to have such widely accepted sex ambiguous titles as
    `fire fighter' and `police officer'. I am also in full agreement with
    your conclusion that all those awful sloppy and ambiguous words of
    the form xxx-man must go.

    But think of all the thousands of words that contain the suffix -`man'
    that have no other clear-cut name! Like `chairman'. Fortunately,
    this word has the ever-popular demasculized alternate `chairperson'.

    Many others are less fortunate, for example -- repairman, swordsman,
    journeyman, draftsman, doorman, sportsman, Scotsman, salesman -- as well
    as a crushing number of obscure job titles like brakeman, flagman...

    Now if you waste your time coming up with suitable replacements for
    these, you will have thoroughly missed my point, just as you entirely
    evaded the point of my last article by special-casing the examples and
    failing to confront the general problems they represent.

    What we need is a generally useful suffix to replace -man, not just for
    words that already exist, but also as a general replacement for an
    extremely prolific formative element in our language. 

============================================================================

> "Fireperson" or other groaners *are* sloppy and ambiguous... 

    Now to my experience, `fireman' is the most commonly used of the triplet
    fire-{man,person,fighter}. But if `fireperson' is sloppy and ambiguous,
    then surely `fireman' is the sloppiest and most ambiguous of all. 

    Clearly a typing blunder here!

    Surely you meant:

> "Fireman" or other groaners *are* sloppy and ambiguous... 

    Otherwise, your article makes no sense at all.

-michael