Until someone starts using the hole for a purpose that's not maintenance and we start arguing again :).

Or for something that is gendered.

But what if manhole is just mankind hole? (It probably isn't, I didn't look it up). Man doesn't always mean male, or does it?

> Man doesn't always mean male, or does it?

Not necessarily, but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_English#D...

The link is about the debate as it is, but I would also encourage the use of good faith in interpreting any speaker: that is, assuming a person referring to "mankind" likely means all humans without exclusion based on gender or sex, and requiring some other material evidence before presuming bias.

I also wonder what these discussions are like in languages where most nouns are gendered, e.g., in French.

No clue about French but in German they started to use both versions at the same time glued together in made-up "special" forms. It's like using "he/she" for every noun. This makes texts completely unreadable and you need even browser extensions[1] to not go crazy with all that gendered BS language!

OK, I exaggerate, there are still people that don't try to be "politically correct" and still use proper language, and know that there is such a thing called "Generisches Maskulinum (English: generic masculine)"[2]. But in more "official" writings or in the media the brain dead double-forms are used up until the point you can't read such texts any more: Those double-forms (which are not correct German) cause constant knots in the head when trying to read a text that was fucked up this way.

(Sorry for the strong words but one just can't formulate it differently. As the existence of that browser extensions shows clearly I'm not alone when it comes to going mad about that rape of language. Also often whole comment sections don't discuss a topic at hand but instead most people complain about the usage of broken "gendered" pseudo-politically-correct BS language. That noun-gendering is like a disease!)

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/binnen-i-be-g... [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generisches_Maskulinum

Thanks for sharing. As a German learner this is quite fascinating to know.

Believe it or not, we introduced a variant of bash brace expansion (except with implicit braces and dots instead of commas) in our grammar, named it “écriture inclusive”, and called it a day.

The way it kicks words previously loaded with neutrality in the curb but happened to have the same spelling as the gendered one, and entrenches a two-gender paradigm boggles the mind as to how it flies in the face of any form of inclusivity.

That and I still don’t know how to read “le.a fermi.er.ère” aloud. It’s just as ridiculous as “cédérom” because Astérix puts up a show at standing against the invader.

Viewpoints can be encoded in language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_as_norm

> In practice, grammatical gender exhibits a systematic structural bias that has made masculine forms the default for generic, non-gender-specific contexts.

many instances of this are simply an artifact of 'man' previously being an un-gendered term. but that fact is much harder to build group cohesion around than grievance.