Or political correctness raises its head again.
The church I attend is going to have a vote next week on whether "church" should be continue to be part of its name. One member gave an impassioned argument for dropping "church" from the name in favor of "congregation".
Her argument was that there are people who are put off by the word church because of past abuses of Christianity. I wonder if these people would even attend if the name is changed. I also wonder if by trying to be all things to all people an organization becomes nothing to everybody.
She also brought up the old saw about replacing "mankind" in hymnals and elsewhere with "humankind". But the words have essentially the same historic meaning. Various sources attribute "human" as coming from the latin "hominus" - "man". On the other hand, "man" originally meant "person" and came from a word meaning "mind". Does this mean if we don't want to use "mankind" for people in general that they have no minds?
Once the males were called "werman" and the females "weibman". Rather than corrupt other people's writings to make them politically correct, why not revert to calling males "wermen"?
See my article on Bowdler.
