| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Page 182
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| and 76 percent of the men) in the sentence The chairman will be appointed by the Faculty Senate. But only 48 percent accept the use of the word in Emily Owen, chairman of the Mayor’s Task Force, issued a statement assuring residents that their views would be solicited, where it is applied to a woman—and in this case the gender split is not nearly so dramatic, only 8 percent. | 1 |
| To many writers, however, the distinction between general use and use in reference to women seems only a fine one, and they choose not to use such restrictive -man words at all. There are several strategies for replacing compounds formed with man. When referring to women, you can use parallel terms like businesswoman, spokeswoman, and chairwoman. You can also use common-gender terms coined with person, such as businessperson, spokesperson, and chairperson. For occupational titles ending in -man, new standards of official usage have been established by the U.S. Department of Labor and other government agencies. In official contexts, terms such as firefighter and police officer are now generally used in place of fireman and policeman. | 2 |
| In addition, there are some entirely new, more inclusive phrases, such as first-year student for freshman, letter carrier for mailman, and workers’ compensation for workmen’s compensation, with which you can replace older terms based on the -man model. You can also reword with a phrase, such as member of the clergy for clergyman, or try a clipped form, such as chair for chairman. English also has a number of long-standing gender-neutral agent nouns, such as cleric and head, that you can avail yourself of. | 3 |
| Of course there are some words, such as unsportsmanlike or showmanship, for which there are no exact synonyms. In cases like these you may need to completely reword the sentence if you want to avoid using a -man compound. | 4 |
| Since most of the new terms can give no offense to traditionalists, it only makes sense to use them and thereby avoid alienating the nontraditionalists in your audience. | 5 |
master
| | Like man, master is a word that has produced many familiar compounds and other usages in English. The compounds include masterpiece, mastermind, masterstroke, concertmaster, master bedroom, and master plan, to name a few. If you have an original document to copy, you may refer to it as the master, and if you have conquered a particularly difficult problem, you might say you have mastered it. However, also like man, for many people master has masculine associations because of its sense “a man who serves as the head of a household.” | 6 |
| Many senses of master, such as the noun sense “an expert” and the verb sense “to make oneself an expert at,” have long been considered gender-neutral and are in wide use. Some words, like masterpiece and master plan, have lost most, if not all, of their associations with maleness. They exist as distinct words, and people do not usually think of them as a combination of parts each containing a different meaning. Despite this, some people are offended by the use of master in any context—whether by itself or in compounds—because of its connotation of maleness and its associations with the institution of slavery. | 7 |
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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