(See description) Do you care about gender equality in everyday speech?

I prefer gender neutrality where appropriate...such as "speaker" or "server" or "flak" or "resource" or "representative" or...

But dang it, when I'm in some hot email chatroom, she better be using gender appropriate words...I'm not in to gender-neutral spunk and splash.

This is a complicated problem but we have to rid ourselves from brain washing. For example to God a man is wrong, it takes away the female aspect of the deity that is suppose to be perfect.
By practising to use non sexual descriptions and terms in our daily lives we will promote gender equality and eventually rewrite the dictionaries.

I never use male or female terms when referring to a title that includes both sexes. It is ignorant to do otherwise. PS Your bitch comment isn't all that clever.

What? Profanity isn't clever?

Thanks for telling me this.

I'm not a PC kind of person.

You can cause a lot of problems by leaving women out of the equation. Its like a slap in the face to us and a major insult.

There's a slight difference in leaving women out of the picture and saying "postman", though.

that's true, postwoman sounds weird. Mail person? Mail Man, Mail Men? Although, Mail Men is understood to umbrella both genders. So its not so bad.

Might as well stay to the old way. We shouldnt have to change our already bastardized language just to be politically correct. Just say what comes out best, and if you offend people tell then where to stick it.

I'd care if it actually implied male superiority...but just with "mankind" "man" just indicates "human".

But of course. I say huperson, woperson, and shaperson. And that Middle Eastern country is Operson.

Gender assumptions really bother me.

I don't feel the need to change terms like Congressman or mailman, but I am insulted weekly by people who read the title "Dr." in front of my surname and are surprised to see a short Italian woman instead of a wrinkled white man. I don't concern myself too much with terms that appear gender specific, but when titles have no gender attached to them, assumptions seem very sexist.

Hyper sensitivity scares me and i refuse to bow down to the whims. In a few short years we are all going to be running around crying. I mean "server" versus waiter/waitress, why does it matter? Police person, where is the line?

Nice one though Korinthian, been looking forward to another one of your thought provokers...

Heck know have fun call me everything don't matter .

I think it is kind of silly, but I made this a habit for my job. I deal with alot of customers, and some of them appreciate this kind of language, so I made myself use it. I think it helps with sales.

no i still say a few things, that i guess people might freak out about for no real reason. mostly because the words sound funny. for some reason fireperson just sounds wrong to me. i'm not saying a woman can not be a fireman. the word fireperson reminds me of...

sometimes, but not i intend to be that political.

its either or for me i mean its never really mattered cause both applies to either gender

http://re-ap.blogspot.com/200...

Snip:

Suppose I say 'The citizen approached the monarch with a deep bow.' You understand just what I mean--that is, that the supplicant bent over a the waist when approaching the monarch. There's no confusion about whether I was talking about the bending action (a bow), the weapon used to fire an arrow (a bow), or the front of a sailing ship (a bow). Why is this? Clearly, it's because English is a context-dependent language; the meaning of words is determined (in part) by the other words around them. That's why we can have so many referents represented by the symbol 'bow' without being confused; when you add in spoken English, things can get even more complicated (as in the bough of a tree). We call these sorts of words (the first set anyway) homonyms--words that are spelled (and often pronounced) the same, but have different meanings in different contexts--and I'd like to submit that words like 'man,' 'his,' and 'he' function similarly in our language.

I try to be sensitive.

Nope.

I see the use of "man" in Postman, etc as a derivative of human rather then the male vs female. I see beyond the word and look at the intent as you do with an action. Take your child say "Aww FUDGE!" you know what they mean.

not so much the word itself as much as the way men treat women professionally through communication.

Congressman, Mailman, Milkman... doesn't matter. The word "man" in this sense is just a generic term for a person whose sex has not been disclosed.