I hate pointlessly gendered shit. No one sounds much better to me and makes the same grammatical sense as no man. I don’t see it as any different than using they instead of he or she.
It wasn’t considered as gendered, as referring to humanity as “man” is a holdover from when “man” wasn’t ever gendered; we don’t have any recordings of it specifically referring to males until around 1000 CE.
The old words for male/female were “wer” (see: werewolf) and “wīf”, the latter of which diverged into “wifmann” (“female human”), later “woman”, and “wife”, specifically referring to a married woman. You still see “wife” used without implication of marriage status in words like “midwife”.
Anyway tl;dr “man” historically wasn’t gendered, hence it commonly being used to refer to humanity as a whole even in modern use. Also it more accurately states that no humans have been there before, rather than discounting present natives.
Edit: also, as another comment played on, this was used as wordplay in the Lord of the Rings, in which humanity is referred to as “the race of man”, where a prophecy refers to no man being able to defeat one of the antagonists but doesn’t specify that a woman can’t.
I hate pointlessly gendered shit. No one sounds much better to me and makes the same grammatical sense as no man. I don’t see it as any different than using they instead of he or she.
To boldly go where no ugly giant bag of mostly water has gone before.
It wasn’t considered as gendered, as referring to humanity as “man” is a holdover from when “man” wasn’t ever gendered; we don’t have any recordings of it specifically referring to males until around 1000 CE.
The old words for male/female were “wer” (see: werewolf) and “wīf”, the latter of which diverged into “wifmann” (“female human”), later “woman”, and “wife”, specifically referring to a married woman. You still see “wife” used without implication of marriage status in words like “midwife”.
Anyway tl;dr “man” historically wasn’t gendered, hence it commonly being used to refer to humanity as a whole even in modern use. Also it more accurately states that no humans have been there before, rather than discounting present natives.
Edit: also, as another comment played on, this was used as wordplay in the Lord of the Rings, in which humanity is referred to as “the race of man”, where a prophecy refers to no man being able to defeat one of the antagonists but doesn’t specify that a woman can’t.
I don’t have anything to add, but I want to say that I found this comment super interesting.
wait, so are werewolfs trans people or intersex.