I never want Christmas music to end. Maybe Christmas songs were playing in the hospital when I was born. It was Dec 11, so I could see that. Also, it was the 80s, and no one was as “weird” about Christmas.
I saw an interview from a news channel with a man and woman debating the removal of the word “man” in occupations. In short, the woman was promoting a movement to eliminate terms like mailman, garbage man, etc. and replace them with gender neutral terms like adding person.
I think it’s a great idea. Why not? I also think the argument is the same as discontinuing the United States Standard System of measurement: it’s decades overdue. (I’m implying we should have been on the metric system loooong ago. Pretty much as soon as we realized it was based on a system of 10, we should’ve been all over that.)
The interview also brought up the argument of who reserves the right to change something that offends them. Is it the majority or the minority? Maybe we should develop a federal agency to handle these matters – a Department of Offense.
In political correctness discussions, my side has always been the same: let people use whatever terms they want. It’s words.
If someone receiving a message/hearing a speech/reading a book is going to disregard the value in the content because of the use of a term that offends them, it’s their lost. It’s like disregarding the instructions in your vehicle’s owners manual to change a tire because commas are missing.
My weigh in here is that I just don’t believe changing the names of occupations solves as big of a problem as switching to the metric system. Can we circle back to the name-changing after fixing something bigger?
I mean think about how much better math, science, textiles, engineering, etc could be for our kids. There’s the argument that should be on the news — dammit!*
*Dammit or ‘damn it’ used in this instance to troll people offended by profanity.