I live here and do my fair share of mocking my fair self-important city. But this is a good thing. Probably not worthy of endless think pieces, but a good move that others should humbly imitate.
22
My grandfather was a letter carrier (not a mailman!) 75 years ago. It’s about time the rest of nation gets with the program.
18
I remember years ago reading that another city was considering whether and what to rename manholes. One suggestion, rejected, was “Sewer Viewer.” Yet another opportunity lost.
31
@Pierson Snodgras
I love this one! IMO, they - whichever city it was - should’ve adopted it. Not only rhymes, but is quite descriptive; and... just strikes me as funny. Made me laugh out loud!
3
I support the Code updates. Almost 30 years ago in school, a professor mentioned 'Workman's Compensation' during class discussion. A student offered instead, 'Worker's Compensation.' It made sense then, and makes sense now. Vernacular and terminology shifts and evolves to reflect our ever-changing human condition.
35
@Rob You said "human" – did you mean huperson?
10
I’m glad I left when I did. Things haven’t changed. Obviously the city council has too much time in their hands. Instead of worrying about improving the lives of its residents by lowering taxes, reducing homelessness by building affordable housing, implement better waste management, and reducing traffic and noise pollution, they worry about inanimate objects insulting their selfish sense of political correctness. No wonder Trump appeals to so many individuals. It is evident we live in an age of ridiculousness, from the White House on down.
70
Glad to see that Berkley --- having solved the problems of high rents, homelessness, gentrification and crime --- has turned time and effort to this pressing issue!
108
@badubois Agreed Liberals about stifling voice and language...Not tackling real human social economic problems. read 1984 and think NYT
California is the liberal test lab for the the US.
CA Incredibly rich AND Incredibly poor with no means of pulling themselves out from poverty
11
@Frank
Quiet Franny. You still not making much since and never did when The Globe had comment boards.
Living in Berkeley is a constant source of embarrassment but at least the restaurants are good.
104
@Someone else
Next thing know, Chez Panisse will be changed to Chez They.
2
Yet another faux issue that exemplifies why Trump will be re-elected. I am a liberal Democrat. But my eye is on the prize, which is making Trump a one-term president. Re-naming manhole covers. Banning plastic straws (which the Trump campaign is now selling). And the Democratic candidates out-Lefting one another like lemmings over a cliff. All of this plays to the coasts (where I live), but turns off the Rust Belt voters we need to win. May as well swear Trump in for his second term now.
123
@CG
Pray tell, what can Berkeley do to help defeat Trump? And should the entire state of California put everything on hold until Trump leaves office? I'm sure anything Berkeley or California does can be made into "radical leftwing socialist overreach to take away your guns" by Trump.
The city and the state governments still have to respond to their constituents desires (democracy, remember?). And competent people can remember to vote against Trump while still carrying on with the rest of their lives.
the changes in Berkeley don't seem to affect Fairfield and are otherwise within bound of human decency, so just let them be.
7
@CG
Whatever happened to “personhole” as a substitute for “manhole”?
I think “personhole” best illustrates the monumental stupidity of thinking that it is somehow necessary or desirable to dis-gender language.
3
Posted on my Facebook page yesterday that Berkeley likely just handed the election to Trump.
2
It follows that Person must be changed to Perchild, and any Hoffman should now be considered Hoffperchild.
4
If followed do other things get renamed? How about the descriptors that include the word "trans"? City buses that are used for transport? Transfer station aka as the dump? Transformers used in the power supply grid...........Where does this thinking go, and how far?
2
This is the work of a mad...er...person!
4
Yet another reason why America still needs the Electoral College.
18
Whatever happened to “personhole” as a substitute for “manhole”?
I think “personhole” best illustrates the monumental stupidity of thinking that it is somehow necessary or desirable to dis-gender language.
7
@Mon Ray
Call it a shaft or sewer access or utility access. Having worked at low level jobs, I know women are subjected to taunts such as: Hey, that's a MAN hole. You can't go down there! Why do you think it's called a 'MAN hole.' Women need to be able to do these job without all the old baggage of reserving them for males when women can do them just as well. The traditional male only jobs pay a lot more than 'women's work.'
The woman who just brought me my package via USPS is a mail carrier. I grew up seeing only mailmen or reading about postmen. Fire fighter, Congress member, council member and similar terms signal equal opportunity for men or women. What's so bad about that?
9
OMG! They forgot to change Manchester in all their library books. And the HIStory section. I feel insulted and demand an apology.
12
@joao Santa rita
"Mancunium" was a Roman name from the town in its early days. The Latin root differs greaty from old German content words. Honor the history and the evolution of the language.
'History' evolved from Old French which evolved from Latin. It follows orthographical conventions for changes.for 'estoire' meaning chronicle, story, a timeline of related events.
It would be absurd to insinuate that such words have anything to do with the issue of gender equality in the workplace. It just such attitudes that shows the need for the changes.
3
In related news, survey says, today 86% of they would not give up their seat in a lifeboat for a them, and why should they?
13
This is how Democrats proceed to LOSE elections!! By focusing on things that NOBODY finds it necessary to focus on, AND by becoming overly consumed by “identity politics!”
Trump and his nefarious ilk need to go, pronto! But I have to tell you, many people may be wondering what a Democrat government would be like if they focus on stuff like this when there are real big problems that need handling in our country!
Keep it up my fellow Democrats and once again we may snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!
16
Don't we have more important problems to solve?
15
Dude, what's up with that ? Oh boy, I guess 'dude' is out too. And 'oh boy' doesn't pass the test either. Not even 'oh brother' ? Man, I give up!
24
From the German Mann meaning one, a person. See the Oxford English Dictionary. Too bad the Berkeley-ites didn't bother to do their homework.
10
And when one describes one’s assailant to the police “They was a 6’ tall human wearing ...”? Missing persons: “They is a 37 year old human with brown hair....?
11
@ABaron shouldn’t it be huperson?
1
I was there a few months ago. It seems they have bigger problems?
21
Come on, guys, girls (and anyone else), don't you think this has now gone beyond all reasonableness, and that Berkeley is now being run by The Three Stooges after Curly obtained a college degree by beating Moe and Larry to death with the last remaining typewriter in the city?
26
@Joe Pearce
Actually, the article indicates that Berkeley is just doing catch up and following a trend that has been going on for decades.
What about my favorite ottoman?
12
@Orange County Voice
From online dictionary:
1580s (n.), c. 1600 (adj.), from French Ottoman, from Italian Ottomano, from Arabic 'Uthmani "of or belonging to 'Uthman," Arabic masc. proper name, which in Turkish is pronounced Othman (see Osmanli), name of the founder of the dynasty and empire.
You are welcome!
This needs to be changed to maintenance hole covers.
We are talking about covers, not holes.
6
@Glenn Woodruff
I would prefer they change it to 'shaft' which is short and businesslike. It is also descriptive. You have sewer shafts and utility shafts. From German : der schacht
2
Perfect timing. Just when we're celebrating 'That's one small step for (a) man, one giant step for mankind'.
10
@Anant Deboor
That was a few generations ago. A few things have changed. It would have been inconceivable that a woman would have been a test pilot or an astronaut. Both those job titles happen to be gender neutral.
So, what's wrong with saying 'humankind'? Are we not evolving?
"She gave the example of a girl growing up and hearing the word chairman, unsure whether that job was for her." Isn't this an ugly sexist statement? I don't believe there are girls that are that silly.
19
Well, what about mankind, woman, human?
3
OK, NYT. If you’re so supportive of the use of they, them, and their as singular, please start using these terms in your daily reporting and watch as your already shrinking readership plummets. In other words, put your money where your (non-gendered) mouth is.
27
In changing man-made to human made,
shouldn't they then change manhole to,
you guessed it human hole?
8
Singular they is nothing new--goes back to Middle English (Old English didn't have plural they, or any they at all). Singular they is actually older than singular you (you was plural, thou, singular, till the 17th c.). Ambiguity, when it occurs, is a natural linguistic phenomenon. Speakers and readers have ways of figuring it out. As for expecting clarity from laws, great idea, to be sure, but if the meaning of words in the law was always clear, judges and lawyers would have lots more time for golf, social media, and letters to the Times.
3
@Dennis Baron
> “Old English didn't have plural they, or any they at all”
Old English had a third-person plural pronoun, though of course different in form, e.g. line 15 of Beowulf:
> þæt híe aér drugon aldorléase
> (that they suffered before, leader-less)
4
And another thing: singular 'they' doesn't make laws ambiguous; generic 'he' ALWAYS made laws ambiguous, since it was only interpreted as generic when that suited the (mostly male) legislators and judgers doing the interpretation.
2
At least it's good to know that the roads, housing, crime, schools, libraries and other aspects of civic life in Berkeley are all in such a fine state that Berkeley's city council can afford to spend time and resources rewriting the English language.
27
I guess Woman Hole would have been too suggestive?
20
Joe Biden has a habit of saying “come on man”.
Perhaps he should say “come on they”?
18
One small step for a person, one giant step for personkind?
10
Hmm guess they’ll have to get rid of ‘mansplaining’ too.
22
I'm an old school pro peace, pro environment, pro civil rights and equality liberal who used to live in Berkeley and supported the progressive Berkeley government but this is just beyond ridiculous. The people who are going to love to most are not progressives but the right wing infotainment outrage machine. They will get so much mileage out of it making us leftists look like petty silly fools while the earth burns from climate change and the post WWii world order disintegrates.
24
"They who hesitates (hesitate?) is (are?) lost."
19
oh help I don't even know how to express how utterly futile it is to waste energy on this PETTY stuff that could be better spent making a unified effort to defeat the frightening despot who threatens to make these considerations irrelevant
16
Ever wonder why manhole covers are round rather than square?
Cause if they were square, they wouldn't fit over the manholes.
4
@a Benepe, they are round for the simple reason that they cannot be dropped thru the aperture (wow, new word for hole), where as a square or any other shape could fall into the abyss.
The impulse to eliminate the distinction between men and women in favor of a bland neutrality is a deeply disturbed one.
29
The letter “X” has, in some cases, been used to intimidate others. I just mention that in case Berkeley is running out of things to do and wants to continue to employ its cleansing efforts productively.
9
Indeed, the roads, housing, crime, schools, libraries and other aspects of civic life in Berkeley are all in such a fine state that Berkeley's city council can afford to spend time and resources rewriting the English language.
8
Around 15 years ago San Francisco and Berkeley officially changed from using "pet owner" to "pet guardian." It doesn't make sense to refer to owning another being. Nice change.
3
Looks like that change solved the homeless problem. Let’s keep it up!
19
The roll out does seem pretty tortured. Whoever thought up "maintenance hole" as replacement for manhole has never worked within anywhere near a manhole. You're replacing two syllables for four and "maintenance" is hard to pronounce. The vowel sounds blur together when spoken quickly or around loud noise. For instance, when you're meet a deadline doing maintenance beneath a busy street. You couldn't try "utility access" or "service port" instead?
Actually, most government workers doing the work aren't going to refer to a manhole by the object's name anyway. The location is what matters. The location name is further abridged to match the abbreviations used in the ticketing system. Something like "Utility Panel 23 at the Computer Science Building" becomes "CS-23." That's what anyone who has to work with that panel will call it.
8
Language matters. It subtly and not-so-subtly influences our thinking. For that reason, I support using gender-neutral words for professions such as "councilmember" and "flight attendant." Women can feel left out.
For the same reason, I can't for the life of me get behind the use of "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. Why use a word which is already functioning perfectly well as a plural pronoun when the English language has such imaginative possibilities? Decades ago, someone coined the word "Ms." as a better equivalent to the word "Mr.," and it caught on pretty quickly. Surely we can use "xhe," or some other neologism.
People often have to communicate quickly and efficiently when under strain--this word "they" is going to bite us if its plural designation blends with the singular. "They're coming to dinner tonight"--really? How many place settings do I put out? "Send help--they're bleeding!" My goodness--how many medics shall I send? Etc.
12
I might add imprecision in language is often confusing or even dangerous in the workplace. Eliminating personal pronouns in common usage with intentional ambiguity is appropriate where ambiguity is intended. However, the practice doesn't work so well in a kitchen where lots of hot and pointy things are flying around. You want to know if the person yelling "SHARP!" is talking to you. We only used nicknames in that job. Pronouns need not apply, much less indefinite ones.
3
He and she absolutely cannot equal "they" as a neutered substitute––duh, he and she are singular. If you want to neutralize them and continue to refer to a single person, then use "xhe." And yes, it's pronounced ʒhe. With all the rampant misuse we see changing the language, isn't it time for some nice simple creativity? Problem solved.
3
Will the Berkeley libraries have to conform to the new gender purge by changing book titles? Will we have Flaubert's "Person Bovary," H. Rider Haggard's "They," Dostoevsky's "The Siblings Karamazov," D. H. Lawrence's "Them in Love," Dashiel Hammett's "The Thin Them" or Wilde's "They of No Importance"? Some people may find themselves limited by the pronouns “he” and “she,” but such persons cannot hijack the English language, appropriate the plural word “they” when referring to an individual and force everyone to adopt this non-sensical usage.
68
The late, great George Carlin came to mind when I first heard about this. He was ahead of his time. Carlin on euphemisms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
15
Man by the by is a term meaning human. Which is NOT hu plus man. Not do plus man.
This usage of man has dropped as the gender clowns have won ground.
Just google the words brothers and sisters. That is how hard it is to know better. Not worth the bother eh?
12
I love how worked up this makes everyone. (1) it doesn't hurt anyone or really cost anything; and (2) it's mildly entertaining. The sky is not falling.
2
No, the sky is clearly not falling. This is a very trivial issue. But that’s the point. Government wasting time and money on trivial issues when there are real issues they should be addressing.
8
Berkeley, like much of the Bay Area , has a housing crisis and a homeless crisis that gets worse every year yet pronouns are the hill they want to die on?
11
all these straws on the camels back have pushed me to the conservative side.. I do not support trump, but I no longer recognize the Democratic Party.
48
@D
Over this?
Calm down Francis.
3
You’re referring literally to the drinking straws as well, yes?
1
It’s a serious issue, especially for Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin and Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro and many other Republicans who have been obsessing about manholes for awhile but unwilling until now to speak out.
4
Dear Berkeley, your intentions may be noble but this is precisely the sort of move that will help Trump get re-elected. Reconsider, please
42
Could you work on housing instead of semantics, please.
61
Nice try, patriarchy. 'Maintenance' still has 'man' in it, you've just padded it out with other letters. I see you.
13
Maintenance holes I feel the oppression lifting. That said women still make 70 cents on the dollar. I think that is the bigger issue. Men are stilling women what to do with their bodies. I guess Berkeley already solved these less important issues.
4
I prefer "artificial" over "human made". But otherwise, good for them. To each their own.
I'm not sure where Winston Smith or Big Brother or Orwell would weigh on this issue. Government mandated language?
They who controls the present controls the past
8
@H
Can't use 'mandate.' How about theydate or themdate?
13
Unfortunately, I've had to spend quite a bit of time recently in and out of doctors' offices and hospitals. Fortunately, I've been able to depend upon countless 'nurses' of the highest quality professionalism, expertise and compassion to assist me on an often hourly basis. That's how I judged them and that's how they judged me, regardless of race, creed, color or any other criteria.
How absolutely asinine an example of political correctness this shamefully is.
23
@Guido Malsh
Male nurses are still called nurses. The profession is called nursing. Walt Whitman was a nurse during the Civil War. Are they calling it something else now in Berkley?
3
@Patrick
Hopefully, a nurse is still a nurse is still a nurse and always will be.
1
While Berkeley is changing pronouns they are neglecting the homeless, rv problem. There are people living on the streets, in tents and rv. The city wants to license rv s to be able to stay in Berkeley and even allow them to park in residential areas. As liberal as Berkeley may be in reputation its present council and administration are way out of whack with reality.
24
The word ‘manhole’ is less offensive than the assumption that a woman strong enough to lift one is still so weak and child-like as to be bothered by its name.
15
Speaking as a Berkeley resident we're somewhat conditioned to this sort of thing. Some of them actually turn out well. The Berkeley tool lending library is a good example that has been copied other cities. Some are completely silly, like when the council voted to provide Code Pink with city-sanctioned parking spots so they could demonstrate against the Marine recruiting. Fox News loved that one.
3
As if there aren't more important things to worry about.
Spouse got new gender-neutral senior citizen MTA card today. The old one worked just fine.
How much did that cost taxpayers?
19
Thank goodness!!
1
whst about woman?
1
@jbc
Short for womb-man I believe.
2
Swedish has two words for he and she: “han” and “hon.” Over the past few years, a gender-neutral word, “hen,” has been introduced to some success. English lacks such a linguistically elegant option, as we are finding. We are stuck with “person” or the clunky “they” options.
4
When will the United States stop it's illegal occupation of Berkley?
U.S. out of Berkley now!!!!
9
@Lawrence Berkeley, not Berkley
2
Fixing English shouldn't be that difficult, but how will they "neuter" Spanish?
8
All adjectives will now end in -e instead of a/o.
This is a joke, right? Berserkly is a hard reputation to lose. Where does it stand on the word “human”?
5
I'll take "maintenancehole" over "personhole." I somehow can't picture maintenance person Chris being dispatched to the "personhole" at Cedar and San Pedro.
2
Besides trying to be politically correct... how much more stupid are the fat cats in Berkeley and beyond? We all have a gender id from birth. So, regardless of gender orientation/preference, it all comes down to man and woman. Don't you think? If not, how can I refer then to my father and mother, my grandpa and my granny, or my uncles and aunts? Crazy!
13
@Manuel Manuel, you can warmly address your mother and father as "parental units" from now on.
11
Why not make it a "humanhole"?
5
How about a "street hole"? The hole is in the street after all... it's rather ambiguous what will actually go in the hole, but the fact that the hole is in the street is rather clear. :-)
1
Instead of ‘race and gender’ hustling, maybe these people ought to come down from their intersectional cloud long enough to clean up the disgusting, disease-ridden piles of garbage accumulating under the University Avenue-Frontage Road exit.
44
Ridiculous. But go ahead. Reelect Trump.
63
If English goes much further on this suicide path, those who wish to communicate sense will have to go back to using Latin.
24
Before we all stop laughing at Bezerkeley, why doesn’t the Berkeley City Council do something that is really needed and useful: pass a law creating four new singular pronouns—one a subject pronoun, one an object pronoun, one a possessive pronoun and one a reflexive pronoun— to take the places of he/she, him/her, his/her and himself/herself. In other words, male OR female, singular genderless pronouns to match they, them, their and them. The lack of such useful pronouns is a glaring lacuna in the English language. If Berkeley passed such a law, English-speaking people everywhere would stop laughing and quickly follow suit.
4
Make sure the Spanish teachers teach (create) a gender-free version of Spanish.
16
Wow. Now THAT'S a good use of time and resources. No wonder liberals are ridiculed by the right.
48
This is insane. It won't play well in more sensible areas of the country.
22
Thank God for this. I will sleep sooooooo much better tonight. But, forgive me as another question arises: Have manhole covers been shown to cause cancer in the state of California?
15
They have nothing better to do in Berkley?
While it may be apocryphal, it is said that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" so, to paraphrase, "sometimes a hole is just a hole".
4
@Fred The reference to cigars is about Freud, who was asked if smoking cigars had a sexual implication; well-known as a cigar smoker, Freud was rather defensive in his response that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (i.e., not a phallic symbol, at least not for Freud).
2
I wonder how many new jobs are going to have to be created and manned, I mean personed, in order to enforce these gender-purging code changes in Berkeley. I for one intend to use a gender neutral term also ending in "hole" to describe the geniuses who voted for this silly amendment in an effort to cement their traditional role as the leading snowflake city in the U.S.
51
@Jay You win "best comment"! I think I heard about this on Colbert last night and thought it was just a sarcastic joke. Thanks, Berkeley, Trump and his base will be on top of this thru 2020.
4
A region with a genuine humanitarian crisis on its hands in terms of homelessness and affordable housing and THIS is what they focus on? Wow. This might truly top the list of first-world problems.
73
I have no axe to grind with Berkeley on this issue, but it is this form of identity and PC politics that will tilt the 2020 election to Trump (unfortunately). The vast majority of people in the US will think this is nonsensical, and Trump will use this to tar the left as being out-of-touch with pocketbook issues and intruding on American norms.
42
What replaces woman?
7
Man is from the word human. Not a gender thing. "Manhole" will live on.
12
Then say “human.”
Easy.
2
@Grail Cook
No it would have to be humanhole, actually.
Let it alone. Never imagined gender entered into it till it was brought up, followed by grotesque images.
6
Yes, I too am squirming a bit with unbiddened images coming to the fore.
Blech. Not that such things aren't common to everyone.
2
@JFP
Do you happen to be a man by any chance?
I meant "unbidden." Sheesh, this gender business has fried my brain.
1
Um, the origin of manhole is Germanic and means ‘hole for a hand’, nothing to do with gender of person using said hole.
66
@Mg-- can you provide some basis for that claim? the online etymology dictionary says it is a word first used in 1793 based on man+hole. https://www.etymonline.com/word/manhole
3
Who will enforce this persondate: the Mayor or the City Personager? For those who resist this personhandling of the English language, will a writ of persondamus be necessary to enforce this?
I hope these regulations don't reach Personhattan.
97
@Greg For the win!
15
I love this!
6
When a homeless person dies in Berkeley should the city council be charged with negligent personslaughter?
2
I wonder if Orwell is still taught at Berkeley.
28
@Blair. Not with the same objective interpretation of the text. But then again undergraduate students are not exposed to Hume, Russell, Goethe or Marcuse, to name a few humanists.
3
@Blair
There wold have to be an alert for possible trauma inducing.
1
Homeless is still homeless, however.
26
@Stefan SF I'm not so sure about that. These days I see the phrases "persons experiencing homelessness" and "unhoused" quite a lot.
2
There's still 'man' in maintenance.
3
Maintenance hole? How about some actual ‘maintenance’..
like cleaning up the garbage-strewn streets and underpasses!
29
As always, the Brits are far ahead of us. To wit— from decades ago:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=js5-OsdvqTY&feature=youtu.be
(Note the change in the word to ‘person-hole’ at 1:45)
1
Will they stop teaching languages with gendered nouns?
23
Man-made is surely referring to “mankind”, which as I understand it is inclusive of all.
Oh wait, who even cares?
7
@Christie But it's not, not really. There's a long-standing assumption in our culture that the norm, the standard, for humanity is the male. That's come under a lot of attention recently as real world implications of that are being publicized - crash test dummies were modeled on the average male (not the average female) so women are more likely to die in car accidents, drugs are tested only on men but have different effects on women, etc. It's not an accident that the word for male people and the word for humanity as a whole is the same. So although I kind of agree that Berkeley is being a little silly here (there's no need to get rid of the words 'sister' and 'brother') and I agree that 'they' as a singular is kind of dumb, it really would behoove us to try to change our speech away from incorporating the automatic assumption that the default human is male.
7
@Christie
humankind
I guess liberal people have their priorities straight.
15
@Thomas no they have their priorities gay. Please you must be politically correct.
11
What is wrong with the neutral “it” as the third person singular?
The use of the pronoun “they” to mean both the third person plural and now also the third person singular impoverishes English.
11
Here we go again with this politically correct world we are now living in. So are we now supposed say 'wo' instead of woman?
28
Is “it” the singular “they” are seeking?
6
Hmm. Reminds me of the end of The Hitchhiker's Guide when a bunch of idiots where trying to recreate civilzation from scratch. When Ford Prefect asked a marketing executive how they'd failed to reinvent the wheel after her committee had been working on it for over 6 months, she replied, "Okay, Mr. Smart Alec, if you're so clever, you tell us what color it should be." Why do liberals insist on handing red mear to Fox News on a silver platter?
30
@asdfj, there will likely be more when they are not called manholes. That's the point.
2
A maintenance hole should be an entry way if a person can pass through it and an access point if it is meant only for viewing, sampling or working from outside the space.
It would make more sense for the American Society of Civil Engineers to provide meaningful replacement terms that will be informative.
4
@Geo
Actually, “manhole” is a layman’s term. The technical term for them depends on what they are used for. But I guess the upcoming agenda will be to purge Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues of such sexist references. The new lines will be: ”Better jump down a maintenance hole”, and “You don’t need a weather person to know which way the wind blows”.
1
I love living here, but sometimes I do wonder if our tax money is being spent in the best way possible. I guess it's the price of living in Bezerkeley.
29
Why does it have to be horsepower? What if the poor horses object?
25
It should be kilowatts, but that's a totally different, and actually IMPORTANT, discussion!
2
@Phil: and if James Watt objects?
After years of reading of "gender issues," when the issues were actually those of sex, I am happy to read that Berkeley is truly resolving gender issues.
1
@Arthur
Is sex still legal in Berkeley?
1
much ado about inference and not need.
Can't fix the NIMBYism - Can't tackle the hard things in Berkeley
7
Wouldn't it be easier to just change the official definition of "man" to person, and let the word male be used for the actual gender assignment? Much ado about nothing.
8
Women have always been taught that ‘men’ means ‘all people.’ I know I was. “Does everyone has his book?” is proper grammar, right? So how about this. Let ‘women’ equal ‘all people.’ How do you feel about that?
If all people are men
And if women are people
All women are men
No thank you.
3
@Phil
Yes, yes. Mankind is defined as the human race. As a woman, I was never put off by the word chairman. Just so I can be one! Let’s spend our time and money better.
5
"Does everyone HAS his book"?
I think you want to say "Does everyone have his book," in which "does," the so-called helping verb, agrees with "everyone."
Now that's proper grammar. Yes.
6
People can mock this, but it does make sense to do away with the vestiges of male-centered vernacular. Let’s stop implying that man is the default gender.
8
@Hal I am tired of seeing differences like
"Soccer" and "Women's Soccer" -- speaking of default. It was also true in NCAA Basketball, and NCAA Women's Basketball.
Now there's the type of differentiation we need to tackle!
This is exactly the point.
Ridiculous.
This is why we keep losing elections. It shouldn't even be close... but then we do this...
91
@J
Seriously you blame Berkeley for modifying their own municipal codes for Democrat's loss. Not racism, voter suppression, Russian influence, electoral college.
Sounds like you've personalized Trump's talking points.
2
@William Fang
I think @J is implying that liberals prioritize issues that don't resonate with most people rather than dealing with problems that people outside of Twitter users care about.
7
The city council persons can find nothing more important to work on?
29
If you can fix cosmetic things that get you in the papers, you can dodge less important work like helping the homeless!
32
Thank goodness. I can sleep easier now.
19
Maintenance of what? Gas, Water, Telephone, or ?? Over my 75 years, I have heard it only as "manhole" or "access hole". Why not use a term that was at least in present usage?
Better than "maintenance hole" would be "access lid" or "portal".
3
Using "they," a plural word, for a singular person sounds like an exercise in confusion. The singular construct is also difficult for English language learners.
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This is amazing. Right on, Berkeley!
1
One small step for a person...one giant leap for persons.
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@LR: Oh! That's so good--thank you! Or, how about: "One small step for humans"; "One giant leap for humankind"--has kind of a nice ring to it, don't you think? Thanks, again.
1
That's not what the man said.
Best not to mess with what was actually said.
Going forward, if you find yourself doing something magnificent, you can use whatever nouns you'd like.
2
i live in the fair city - what do we call the potholes (that the municipality doesn't fix because the budget is tapped out/top heavy with administrators' salaries and pensions/benefits leave no money for street or sidewalk repair?
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@Mark
Cookware holes
2
@Mark "Potholes"?
@Mark
How about "Toms" -- Since you brought it up....
Dang! I was planning to vacation on the Isle of Man. Now I have to go to the Isle of Person. It doesn't sound nearly as attractive.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2 Isle of Humanity sounds pretty good, not that they're planning on changing the name anytime soon.
@The King You're welcome to do so, but "Man" actually comes from the Gaelic name of the people who inhabited the island.
3
@The King Manchester United is now Personchester Disunited. PC madness will help drive Trump re-election.
8
I wonder how many women have roles that entail climbing down those manholes.
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The ones that do don't care what you call them.
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