From: utzoo!hcr!anton
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Title: A person by any other name still has a gender
Article-I.D.: hcr.155
Posted: Wed Jul  7 21:50:08 1982
Received: Wed Jul  7 22:17:08 1982


Let me refer to a passage in Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land"
where Mike quotes a legal passage that decrees the term 'man' to apply
to both genders where applicable. (Sorry my copy is somewhere mid-Atlantic,
so I can't give chapeter & verse).

This is what 'man' **DOES** mean.   Think of the Led Zepplin song,
"Stairway To Heaven".  A line in there goes...

	"..but she wants to make sure
	'Cos you know sometimes words have two meanings."

This is almost exactly the case; 'man' means both 'male' and 'member of 
mankind'.

Purely as an aside, can anybody out there in netland think of a non-technical
(any specialisation, theology, anthropology, Etrucscan coin collecting all
included), non-proper noun English English word that DOESN'T have two 
meanings ?

Other sub-cultures, American English, Pidgin English, Australian English...
can be submitted, but please qualify your entry.  I don't know enough of these
to be able to judge, so can they go to the net, please.

/anton aylward