rarely serious

-site:pinterest.*

Man started out as werman in old English, and woman started out as wīfman. The ‘man’ bit in both of these words means person. The ‘wer’ bit in werman gave us words like ‘werewolf’ - literally man-wolf. The ‘wīf’ part eventually became the word ‘wife’. Over time the word man lost the ‘wer’ bit and the word ‘wīfman’ eventually morphed into the word woman.

This is a linguistics speed run, but it’s why those terfy things with the word man crossed out are so ridiculous to me. Like where they go “woman” “human” etc. Because they love to ignore that the word man existing in any context is not a threat to them.

They even did this to cities like Manchester, England, claiming that the word ‘man’ in Manchester referred to men. It actually refers to breasts. The river Irwell in Manchester used to be known to the Celts as ‘Mamm’, meaning breast and probably relating to a river goddess. The Romans got there, asked the locals what they call it, and then added ‘castrum’, for fort. As the Romans built a fort down in modern day Castlefield. Mammcastrum became Manchester over time.

So yeah, I don’t even trust benign popular feminist ‘activism’ that goes around performatively removing the word man from things, because most often, it has nothing to do with the gender of man, and it just a word that happens to include those three letters. Yknow. Instead of helping vulnerable women, TERFs love to pretend they’re doing something smart by editing words with man in them.