Tolkien and 'Men'

[poe.and.theholograms]

BRING WEREMAN BACK! Every full moon some guy becomes a dude.

[-nvmanyhow]

So, by that logic female werewolves should be called "wifwolves"

[edwinrollins]

I also recently learned that the word "girl" used to also be a gender neutral term for a child or youngster, and sex/gender was indicated with an additional term, "knave girl" for a male child, and "gay girl" for a female child.

[willemakkermans]

This video was so much better than I thought it would be. You had me at your pronunciation of wereman and wyfman.
While I'm here I would just like to add the notion that if language is a popularity contest, we don't necessarily have to rally behind the winner. If a certain use of a word is changing, it may still be of value to preserve the older or lesser used meaning as well. We don't have to follow the herd with (perceived) changes, we are the creators.
But I appreciate your keen work on preserving at least the history of words and their meanings!

[Esmeagolly]

Not only a professor, also wrote a part of the dictionary and is the reason we now write it as dwarves instead of dwarfs

[impRadnik]

If he hadn’t used ‘men’ to refer to humanity, the ‘I am no man’ moment wouldn’t have been possible.

[TheOtakuKat]

We've been doing a disservice to wifwolfs all this time.

[CharredDingleberry]

Let us not forget that Tolkien is the person who translated Beowolf into English as well.

[idcgaming]

In the UK, it's still not uncommon to hear a group referred to as "men" regardless of the actual gender composition. This is especially true in millitary settings.

[AuxLine-wx]

I still do. "...within the hearts of man, " is so much more phonetically gravitational than "....within the hearts of people, "

[Corvothing]

It’s why “one small step for man” is grammatically correct, Armstrong was saying that it was physically a small step for a human to make

[alirubaii]

I don’t think people would assume “men” means “males” in a purposefully archaic/sounding fantasy, though. Context matters.

[ProjectAtlasmodling]

We still use men as gender neutral is certain context. And it's rather clear when we do it

[Athena-]

fun fact: the term "were" derives from common germanic "weraz" which, in turn, comes from the indoeuropean word "WIROS" which is the same root as the latin "vir" for "man".

[dodobarthel]

He probably also really wanted the prophecy/pun of "no man shall kill him" work better 😉

[SawyerCarucci]

The way you say wereman and wifman sounds so nice, it tickles my brain in the best way 😊

[stephenbeardslee]

Its important for Americans to defend the historical version if only to protect the correct readings of the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Sadly it's possible to run into those who insist that the authors meant "all males" not "all people" despite their extensive personal writing about the issue. [and ignoring the hypocrisy of the slave owners who helped write it]

[manuelalaniz]

I don't know why this showed up in my algorithm, but I'm glad it did. This was really neat and fun to learn.

[Grey_Shard]

I love how well-used your copies of the books look. One can tell how much you loved the series from the amount of wear and tear on the spines.

[jcows]

Change isn't always a good thing. I leave it at that for mankind.