Man, oh man

From a November New York Times book review:

Man has sped up his own response times. It now takes us only 10-15 years to get used to the sort of technological changes that we used to absorb in a couple of generations.

But the response time of that sentence isn’t anything like adequate. “Man has sped up”: that language stands out as painfully dated. The Times’s Manual of Style and Usage has cautioned against the language of man since 1999 (and perhaps earlier):

Expressions built on man or mankind strike many readers as a slight to the role of women through history. In a few cases, those expressions may result unavoidably from idiom or a literary allusion. But the writer and editor should weigh the graceful alternatives: humanity, perhaps, or human race or people.

I like humankind, which always takes me back to T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

Scott Pelley of the CBS Evening News has the man problem too. And yes, in 2016 it’s a problem.

[How did “Man has sped up” get past an editor?]

Scott Pelley, phallologocentrist

I just heard it again on the CBS Evening News , Scott Pelley’s language of man: “Mankind lands a spacecraft on a comet.” If mankind is supposed to be an improvement on Pelley’s plain old man , well, it’s not.

This post’s title is a joke, out of all proportion to the moment. But the language of man and mankind is absurdly out of date. As is also, perhaps, the idea of “the evening news.”

[What to say instead of mankind ? How about “the European Space Agency”?]

Scott Pelley, man

Scott Pelley, on the CBS Evening News a few minutes ago: “. . . how man is attempting to restore bird populations threatened by climate change.” Man oh man. A better way to put it: “. . . the effort to restore bird populations,” and so on. Who but people — men and women — would undertake such work?

Pelley fell into the language of “man” last October too. How it grates.

Man’s Human evolution

“The discovery of a skull could change what we know about man’s evolution”: Scott Pelley, right before a commercial break on the CBS Evening News this evening. But when Pelley reported the story, he spoke of human evolution. We are evolving, sometimes with astonishing speed, sometimes not fast enough.

In a 2009 post about singular they, I wrote:

I find in he or she a still appropriate rejoinder to the language of patriarchy that permeated my undergraduate education. My first undergraduate philosophy course: “The Problem of Man.” The professor was a woman. A key text: William Barrett’s Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958). And then there was William Faulkner: “Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” Man oh man. I like humankind.

And I was surprised to hear — and see — the language of man tonight.


[Onscreen, right before the commercial break: dumb language, dumb apostrophe too.]

Two more posts with Scott Pelley and Bob Schieffer
Attack of the Clones
Plus ça change