“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them,” observed author George Orwell. And Princeton University is obviously replete with intellectuals, as evidenced by its new obsession: eliminating the word “man” from its Human Resources Department.
Man, what will they think of next?
It’s all outlined in a four-page memo that aims to make the workplace more “gender inclusive.” As the College Fix reports:
Instead of using “man,” employees are told to use words such as human beings, individuals or people.
Other guidelines? Instead of “man and wife” use spouses or partners. Switch out “man made” with artificial, handmade or manufactured. Don’t use the verb “to man,” as in to work something, instead use to operate or to staff. Throw out workmanlike and replace it with skillful.
The memo goes on to list a variety of occupations that typically include the word “man” in them and offers replacements: business person instead of businessman, firefighter instead of fireman, ancestors instead of forefathers, and so on.
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If you’re wondering who distributed the stupid pills at Princeton, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Like many other institutions of higher miseducation, the university has an LGBT center that recommends using the pronouns ‘“ze, zie and hir,’ ‘they and theirs,’ and ‘Ey, em, eir and emself,’” reports the College Fix. This is to avoid “offending” people who identify as being one of the dozens of invented “genders,” such as Androgyne, Cis, Neutrois, Non-binary, Pangender, and Gender Fluid (can a doctor drain that fluid?). Well, to each his own, I guess.
Yet Princeton has much work to do to achieve its Gendertopia. The school was named in honor of the town of Princeton, which itself is thought to have gotten its name from (gasp!) a dead white male royal, Prince William of Orange of the House of Nassau. So perhaps Princesston would be preferable. Or, better still, Zeton? Hey, is there a term for a “gender-neutral” royal?
Moreover, what of the directive to use the word “human”? The Online Etymology Dictionary (OED) tells us that the term is derived “from Old French humain, umain (adj.) ‘of or belonging to man’” (ouch!). And physician, heal thyself. Before the university’s Human Resources Department issues guidelines on offensive speech, shouldn’t it be renamed the Sentient Biped Resources Department?
And if businessman, fireman, and chairman are verboten, what of woman? The feminists’ “womyn” didn’t exactly catch on, yet the Bible informs that the female sentient biped “shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” And the OED relates that wifman, from which “woman” was derived, can mean “female servant.”
Of course, these damning derivations cut both ways (actually, how many ways are there now?). Consider that the term “boy” has a number of possible origins, hardly any of which are flattering. Why, etymologist Anatoly Liberman tells us that in Modern English, “boy looks like a semantic blend of an onomatopoeic word for an evil spirit (*boi) and a baby word for ‘brother’ (*bo).” I’m sure that many people who’ve had little brothers would agree with this thesis.
Speaking of spirits, Princeton was founded as the College of New Jersey in 1746 for the purposes of training ministers; in this it merely reflected academia’s norm, as 106 of the first 108 American colleges were born as Christian institutions. Now Princeton still reflects education’s norm: a collective idle mind that is the Devil’s playground. Consequently, not only can your young sentient biped undergraduate enjoy the latest language innovations at your average college, but ze can also have hir mind stimulated with the most imaginative courses. As I wrote “Diploma Disaster?” in 2013:
As the Young America’s Foundation pointed out in “The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses” (12/9/2006), academia has descended into course offerings such as “The Phallus,” “Queer Musicology,” “Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration,” “Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism,” “Native American Feminisms,” “Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco,” and “Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” just to name a handful. So maybe Johnny can’t read, but he’s fine with that. He knows that language is a white male homophobic social construct, anyway.
But Princeton is right on top of that, don’t you worry. And you can have all four years of such enlightenment, including tuition, room, board, and other fees, for a measly $235,000. It’s the best brainwashing money can buy.
