Any college-level English professor should be familiar with Shakespeare and some quotations from his writings. There is Thermites telling us in Troilus and Cressida (Act 2, Scene 3), “The common curse of mankind, folly and ignorance, be thine in great revenue!” Or, Miranda in The Tempest (Act 5, Scene 1), “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in ’t!” Or Timon of Athens (Act 4, Scene 3), where Timon says, “I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind. For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog, that I might love thee something.” In that one scene, Shakespeare uses the word “mankind,” six times.
Poor Shakespeare. If he were in Dr. Anne Scott’s class at Northern Arizona University, Scott would reject poor English. After all, she did deduct points from Ms. Cailin Jefferstold’s paper. She dared use the word “mankind” in her English composition and Dr. Scott thought that was verboten.
Parents sometimes wonder what their children learn in college, and why many college graduates cannot find a job commensurate with their education. Perhaps Northern Arizona University offers us one lesson, although it is hardly alone. Yale has warned a student not to refer to Plato’s Republic in discussing why rape is wrong. An episode of The Simpsons, aired April 2, 2017, satirizes Yale’s political correctness.
Dr. Scott forbade use of “mankind,” because, she said, it is sexist. She insists that her students must use a gender-neutral term, like “humankind,” a word that has its own Facebook page. Now, if Shakespeare or anyone else uses “mankind,” as in, “Climate change incidents have become global concerns for the whole of mankind,” they should know how sexist they really are.
Professor Scott says that her students must use the word, “humankind.” She apparently prefers that to “hu-person-kind.” Does anything think that when Timon says he hates mankind, he is only referring to males? Or, that when Miranda says mankind is beauteous, she intends to exclude females? Dr. Scott told Ms. Jefferstold that the word, “‘mankind,’ does not refer to all people, only males.”
Any standard dictionary begs to differ. Early and modern writers agree. Ernest Hemingway, in For Whom the Bells Tolls, quotes the poet John Donne, “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” Neither Donne nor Hemingway intended to say that the death of females means nothing.
The U.S. Constitution repeatedly uses the word “he,” as in (Art. I, §6, cl. 2), “No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected . . . .” However, no one thinks that the Constitution intends to exclude women. In fact, even before the 19th Amendment (1920), which gave women the right to vote, there were female representatives. If the framers mean “male,” they would have said “male,” which they use only in the 14th Amendment, §2,
Professor Scott apparently does not understand the etymology of the word “man.” The word comes from the Anglo-Saxon and its origins are sex-neutral. Wifman refers to female, while werman refers to male. We get the word “wife” from “wifman,” and it’s the reason we pronounce “women” with the short “i” sound. Werewolf is a human-wolf. Modern German still uses words like “Wehrmacht,” or male power—the army of Nazi Germany. “Man” or “mann” simply means human, as in the modern Jamaican phrase, “What’s up Monn?”
Scott’s efforts to order or compel language are doomed to failure because language is living and evolving, just like humans. The Culture Ministry of France has tried to control their language, such as banning words like “le weekend“ because they are too English. Still, many French say “le weekend.” English, in contrast, is very accepting of foreign words. England, for example, does not ban “buffet” (although some in Great Britain pronounce the “t”).
There is also the problem of free speech. People have a right to use ordinary English. Perhaps because we have passed 1984 unscathed, we often ignore the significance of George Orwell’s “Newspeak”. Words both reflect and mold the way that people think, which is why they are so powerful and why the First Amendment is so important. Dr. Scott is using her power of grading as a way to control how people talk.
Benjamin Whorf, in his book, Language, Thought, and Reality, tells us, “Natural man, whether simpleton or scientist, knows no more of the linguistic forces that bear upon him than the savage knows of gravitational forces.” Dr. Scott wants to control language, which gives a lot of power to an English composition teacher who would downgrade Shakespeare for bad writing.
Today, it is common to use the term “actor” to refer to either a male or a female actor. For example, IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, has published the “250 list of female actors.” There really is no reason to use “actress” versus “actor” because the ability of the person to act has nothing to do with whether one has an X and Y-chromosomes or not. The modern tendency in language is to become sex-neutral and treat words like “actor” as sex-neutral. But Dr. Scott apparently wants to change all that and impose sex on words that are already (or have become) sex neutral, like “mankind.” That is a step backward for language, not a step forward.
The famous linguist, Benjamin Whorf, after studying the language patterns of Hopi (an American Indian tongue) and various modern European languages—mainly English, French, and German—concluded that even very abstract concepts like “time” and “matter” are “not given in substantially the same form by experience to all men but depend on the nature of the language or languages through which they have been developed.” Another linguist, Edward Sapir, makes essentially the same observation: “Though language is not ordinarily thought of as of essential interest to the students of social science, it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes.”
Genesis, 2:18-24, tells us that after the Lord “fashioned all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven,” the first order of priority was ‘to bring them to Adam, “to see what he would call them; each one was to bear the name the man would give it. The man gave names to all the cattle, all the birds of heaven, and all the wild beasts.” The Bible understands that naming things is important business. Several thousand years later, the Book of John, 1:1, tells us, “In the Beginning was the Word.”
There are limits to the power of words, but there is also a magic in them: not the magic of “abracadabra,” but magic nonetheless. Words have the ability to confuse and to clarify, to help legitimate policies, to generate loyalty, to give the appearance of action, to mold people’s perceptions of the world, to affect the way they approach a problem, and to reflect their innermost thoughts. When people argue about “mere words,” they are talking about fundamentals, about infrastructure, not superstructure.
When Dr. Scott and Northern Arizona University force students to use certain words and shun others, they are tapping into this power—a power easy to abuse. That is why we have the First Amendment. The government should not punish people for using words that our dictionary blesses.
Words change meanings over time, including as society changes in various ways.
The use of “he” as a general pronoun, e.g., has a long history. And, yes, it is used in cases where women too are clearly included. But, it wasn’t truly gender neutral — there was a general assumption that POTUS, e.g., would be a man. This is so even if in theory women could be President some day. It is also a bit weird when the universal usage of a pronoun like “he” is used when explaining the law in a case involving a female. At least there, it sense sensible to use “she” throughout.
Anyway, the change of usage is a means to show that both men and women are involved, language having a symbolic meaning as well. Sometimes, this can be taken a bit too far, but the overall idea has merit.
Hmmmmmmm…….not so sure Mr. Paulson is correct. Yes, uneducated, and unchurched people were probably not able to imagine a woman president; but educated people, like many of our ancestors at the time of the founding, especially our well-educated Founders, knew that women leaders have existed since written history as Queens, Empresses, and even military leaders. Both Plato and Aristotle recognized that women could be equal and even superior to men in their intellects. Modern feminists, however, teach an alternative history in which such knowledge is banished to the memory hole and speaking about it can be punished as a thought crime. When we discuss who really cares about women, we should not include those who suppress the real history of women in the West, while cynically ignoring the suppression of .8 billion Muslim women by a culture that has not changed in a millennium.
Yes, Queen Elizabeth and other women were monarchs, but the general assumption in 1787 surely was that a woman was not likely to be elected POTUS given the realities of society. This does not mean some — including women — didn’t have more foresight. But, John Adams laughing when his wife told him to remember the ladies was a fairly typical reaction.
Women still very well even then were understood to have an important role to play, including as those who raised future leaders. But, it is not some sort of “alternative” history by “modern feminists” to realize that when the masculine pronoun was used, it was used because the default also was male (often white male), the rest in theory possible, but not the image visualized.
“He” in legal documents makes one think of men as does “men” itself.
ETA: The last part about Muslims is gratuitous as well as false. When Pakistan has women chief executives in its short time as a country while the U.S. yet to has one, a bit of modesty too.
Have you read The Reign of the Phallus? The Greeks were ancient Indo-European, that is, of Aryan origin. They practiced plunder, that is, theft, which Indo-Europeans called “raids”, as a basis for their “economy”.
Even early Christian priests blessed theft, until they realized what they were doing and stepped outside (if minimally) of their cultural limits. Females in Greek society were not allowed speech as they were believed to be close to “matter” and without mind or spirit.
I see Professor Rotunda knows English literature but not ancient history. The culture of plundering still exists in the form of rape.
Females were and are plunder to many males in Western civilization. Witness the ineradicability of “sexual harassment” and campus rape in institutions of higher learning in America — including law schools.
Indo-European culture is extant not extinct. The use of the word “humankind” is one attempt to raise up females from the non-speaking position they have been placed in by “authoritative” males, who are authoritative merely by gender category.
HuMANkind is sexist too under this madness. It should be huTHINGkind or HuITkind!
SMH.
What I see is that ones that teach in higher education see themselves on pedestals and that all they teach are servants of theirs. In this the teacher sees no need to for freedom of speech or thought. Just look at hindrances set forth by professors in colleges throughout the country in the news where they think that it is unthinkable for students to challenge their thoughts even outside the classroom. This type of teaching is for dog trainers not for young minds that need to be embraced for self-thought and creative thinking. How is a young person to interpret writings when the writings are demonized or the writing there-of by the authority in charge.
Next the liberals will be changing Macbeth. In modern times, they would remove the line “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!” as racist. (Macbeth Act 5, Scene 3), When will the revisionists stop?
This whole reactionary-politics-as-condescending-literary-history-lecture thing is such a tired meme. It’s like reheated leftovers from something Dinesh D’Souza and Harold Bloom would have spewed out circa 1999.
The worst aspect of this “profs” actions is this is not isolated behavior. The arrogance of the Left reveals they are entitled to cut and paste Shakespeare, use violence to stop free speech, all characteristics of fascism and totalitarianism, but at the same time they call the “opposition” fascists and totalitarian. This is the endgame of the Left, control thought and speech to control individuals and when necessary use violence.. The Left is the enemy of the USA and all of mankind.