Grammar Girl here. I'm in Yon Fog Fog, your friendly guide to the English

language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today we're going to talk about words that sound gendered but aren't,

and then we'll talk about why all grammars leak. Since the 1970s, the English language has been evolving to include more gender-inclusive

terms.

For example, Chairman has become chairperson. Firemen has become

firefighter and policeman, police officer. When we're on an airplane, we're cared

for by flight attendants, not stewardesses. Our letters are delivered by a mail carrier, not a mailman, and we usually refer to all of humanity as humankind, not mankind.

I think we can all agree that these changes are positive, but we also know there's such

a thing as too much of a good thing. And we started to wonder, are there words that might

seem gendered but actually aren't?

We looked at words starting with the prefixes man and cock

signifying male and gine gign gign signifying female.

Here's what we found. For starters, the word man can be traced back to

Germanic dialects like old Saxon, spoken between the 8th and 12th centuries,

A.D.

Back then, man, spelled M-A-N-N,

was a more neutral term.

It referred to people in general, and also to just males.

Over time, it's meaning evolved, and today, man almost exclusively refers to just males.

But not every word that starts with man comes from this ancient German route.

For example, the words manage and manager seem like perfect candidates to be gendered terms.

...