Subscribe"In the 20th century, the generic meaning of man has declined still further (but survives in compounds mankind, everyman, no-man's land, etc). Interestingly, exactly the same thing has happened to the Latin word homo: in the Romance languages, homme, uomo, hombre, homem etc. have all come to refer mainly to males, with residual generic meaning.
The word has historically been used very generally as a suffix in combinations like "fireman", "policeman" and "mailman", because those jobs were historically only jobs that men did. Now that there is an increasing number of women in these jobs, those terms are often replaced by neutral terms like "firefighter", "police officer" and "mail carrier".
Mankind is a commonly used phrase to refer to all of humanity, regardless of sex. However, it is considered sexist by some, and hence, is commonly replaced by "humankind" or "humanity".
Some have proposed alternate spellings for words such as "woman/women" which are perceived as deriving from a masculine term; see womyn. (In some cases, such spellings are based on entirely inaccurate etymologies. The term herstory has been suggested as a feminist alternative to history; however the notion that the term "history" is related to the masculine pronoun "his" is incorrect."
"The word woman can be used generally, to mean any female human, or specifically, to mean an adult female human as contrasted with girl. The word girl originally meant "young person of either sex" in English; it was only around the beginning of the 16th century that it came to mean specifically a female child. Nowadays girl sometimes is used colloquially to refer to a young or unmarried woman. During the early 1970s feminists challenged such use, and use of the word to refer to a fully grown woman may cause offence. In particular previously common terms such as office girl are no longer used.Taking all this into account, and applying all the usual caveats of "This comes from a Wikpedia article", perhaps you could argue that the use of 'man' and 'woman' has been decreasing due as a result of the femenist movement and the belief that these words are inherently sexist, especially the use of 'man' in the word 'woman.'
Conversely, in certain cultures which link family honor with female virginity, the word girl is still used to refer to a never-married woman; in this sense it is used in a fashion roughly analogous to the obsolete English maid or maiden. Referring to an unmarried female as a woman may, in such a culture, imply that she is sexually experienced, which would be an insult to her family.
In some settings, the use of girl to refer to an adult female is a vestigial practice (such as girls' night out), even among some elderly women. In this sense, girl may be considered to be the analogue to the British word bloke for a man, although it again fails to meet the parallel status as an adult. Gal aside, some feminists cite this lack of an informal yet respectful term for women as misogynistic; they regard non-parallel usages, such as men and girls, as sexist."
posted by ottereroticist at 6:31 PM on July 20, 2008