The Internet Virus--A Commentary

[Henry Spencer]

In article <698 at packard.UUCP> shz at packard.UUCP writes:
>Just a minor correction:  Substitute "staff" for each occurrence of "man"
>in the below fragment, yielding "staff-hours", "staff-weeks" and
>"staff-years".

>From a handy dictionary:

"man, n. [pl. men]  1, a mammal of the genus Homo.  2, a person; a human
being.  3, the human race; mankind..."

If they have non-human staff, then I can see the legitimacy of the objection!

(I have no quarrel with people who prefer to avoid the use of masculine
words as generic forms, provided that readability does not suffer, but
criticizing people for using legitimate English is ridiculous.)
-- 
The Earth is our mother.        |    Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
Our nine months are up.         |uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu