The Modern Man Problem.

On my drive into Ashbourne there’s a green, tree-topped mound at the side of the road which doesn’t look natural. It reminds me of a green mound on the golf course at Lochmaben in Scotland which looks unnatural in just the same way. That’s because it is unnatural; it was created – probably in the late 11^th century – to support the first keep built there by the Bruces (or de Bruis as I believe they were known then.)

I looked at the mound again today as I was driving past, and the usual thought occurred to me: ‘It doesn’t look natural. It looks man-made.’ And then a tiny alarm bell rang somewhere in the deeper recesses of my mind:

Is it permissible to use the phrase ‘man-made’ these days?

The wind of change is blowing throughout the world now. Women are asserting themselves, and rightly so. It’s a movement of which I wholly approve, but it’s causing complications. The word ‘man’ is being constantly questioned because often it harks back to the bad old days when men made the decisions, men fought the battles, and men held the power in the ensuing peace which they controlled with traditional masculine energy and sensibilities. Women were largely confined to a subservient position. The likes of Queen Boudicca and Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, are rare exceptions to a pretty well-entrenched rule.

And so I questioned the case of my man-made mound. I asked myself whether it was permissible in this instance because it is surely valid in some circumstances to accept the original Anglo-Saxon sense of the word which is non gender-specific. That’s why the term ‘mankind’ still manages to persist. (Incidentally, I gather the word ‘manage’ does not, as you might expect, derive from ‘man’, but from the Latin manus, meaning ‘hand.’) I decided to play safe and exchange it for ‘manufactured.’

Oh dear; there are those same troublesome three letters at the beginning again. Should I have chosen ‘artificial’ instead? I don’t know. It’s getting complicated, isn’t it?

*  *  *

And in similar vein, I saw a reference today to a piece of music which used the phrase ‘She-King.’ I wondered why they didn’t just call her ‘Queen’, but then realised that the word ‘Queen’ is ambiguous. A queen can be a monarch, or she can be simply the king’s consort. As such, it stills holds titular subservience to the term ‘King.’ I decided I quite liked the term ‘She-King’, but wouldn’t it be odd if our current monarch had to be titled ‘She-King Elizabeth II of Britain.’ Will we ever get past this problem?