Actually, as to “woman” and “man”, I am given to pointing out that in Anglo-Saxon, “man” was the equivalent of the Greek “anthropos”, meaning, “human being without regard to sex or gender”. The Anglo-Saxon equivalent of “gyne” was, of course, “woman”. There was, however, an Anglo-Saxon equivalent of “andros”, “wapman”. Of course, “woman” contains “man”, women and wapmen are the two sorts of men.
All those suffixes -man as in “chairman”, “fireman”, and the like are actually sexless! As a male human being, I want our English word back! Wapmen of the Anglosphere unite! Demand our own word! No longer should we be content to be referred to as generic human beings under the name “man”!
I realize using “manly” to refer to “proper to human beings” and having to use “wapmanly” for masculine, but it’s better than having meetings presided over by inanimate objects (chairs) and having to put up with abominable neologisms like “firefighter”.
My dead cats and dogs are wondering why you posted this message.
"women and wapmen are two sorts of men."
This thread is pretty much hijacked . . . by you. What are wapmen? How many are there? At least two, right?
After reading your post, I looked it up and discovered that “wapman” was for male “men” because it stood for “weapon man”. The word for female “men” was “wifman”, which stood for “weaving man”. This was a cool piece of news for my daughter, who is a weaver. I don’t think my son, the aspiring Jedi Knight, would mind being called a weapon man, either.