Showing posts with label wer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wer. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Oh Man! Another Politically Correct Move to Howl About.

Calgary city council members are making the big change from alderman to councillor.
On the whole, I find the change sad.
Sure it's inclusive. Except that councillor isn't any more inclusive than alderman.
Oh I know it's the word "man" that's throwing everyone.  Man means person. I wish more people knew or remembered that, or at the very least acknowledged it.
An alderman, I learned in school nearly forty years ago, means "wise older person."
On the one hand I recognize steps have had to be taken because we've forgotten the definition of man over the years. Women got to feeling excluded and society reinforced it with the silly notion that some jobs were only for men.
It got to the point of absurdity at times, though. I once heard a woman referred to as "female chairperson."
I think it was back in the eighties.
It still grates.
It's changed and I agree we must be ever-vigilant, but there comes a  point when we need to stop, take a breath, and assess what we're doing.
Meanwhile, there are some titles that are exclusive. To wit, werewolf. That's a wolf who's also a man, and in this case the man is specifically a human male.
"Wer" means man as in human male. Properly we should be women and wermen.
I say we should bring back this prefix. It would solve so many problems and take care of the inadvertent exclusion. 
Getting back to the lycanthrope dilemma. Rather than go with the tortured "female werewolf," that is, a  wolf who is a man who is female, I say we call her a wowolf. I've been doing it privately for years.