I disagree that we shouldn’t constrain the use of words to their definitions. It’s what helps make the meaning of sentences the most clear for everyone. If people had actually done that then the definition of “literally” wouldn’t include “figuratively” and a lot of misunderstandings could be avoided.
Otherwise we could end up with people saying that when they wrote “all white people deserve to die” what they actually meant was that they deserve to live, since that’s how they use the word “die”. It’s nonsensical to me.
Kind of a bad example, because mankind very clearly stems from ‘humankind’. And people are lazy and prefer using short words. The unfairness is rather that women got stuck with the words requiring more characters. But that is a phenomenon of the English language and not present in others.
However, in most languages the words for man/male are closer to human(kind) than female/woman, which very clearly shows the historic patriarchal influence, coming back around to your point after all.
Interestingly enough, in old English you had “werman” and “wifman” for man and woman respectively, in which case referring to all with “mankind” makes perfect sense. So the originator for mankind seems more likely to be from that than the explanation that it’s a shortening of “humankind” to me.
As someone with an electric chainsaw gas is still magnitudes most powerful. This sword would be cool and would cut but it wouldn’t be like butter. You’d have to go relatively slow to avoid excessive friction binding the blade.
Listen, strange women lyin’ near trees distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. That said, if you do pull it from a stump I’m not going to try and take it from you.
According to the Minka Lesk omnibus after the Cadia destruction they did broke for a time before gathering their remains and losing half of their remaining numbers in incredibly suicidal but spectacular attack just to show the rest of Guard they didn’t lost the edge.
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