Re: CHAT: Epicene man (was Re: ...y'know)

At 7:31 pm +0200 1/7/99, BP Jonsson wrote:
>At 06:46 +0100 1.7.1999, Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>
>[Hope you don't mind my snipping all this, man! ;)]
>>But that is exactly the usage I've heard frequently in the last two or
>>three years - it is used as a generic vocative among many of my students.
>>"Hey, man, come over here" may certainly be addressed to a female, young or
>>old (no agism here), and may be uttered by male or female.
>>
>>Ray.
>
>But isn't this caused by the polysemy of English _man_ -- "male human
>being" AND "human being in general"?
I think that possibly helps.

[Now i've snipped yours, man  :)   ]

>Ray, I wonder if it isn't the case that a lot of your students (whom I have
>understood from earlier statements of yours to be a multiculty crowd :) are
>bilingual in languages that habitually make the "male"/"human being"
>distinction which is absent in English?
The students I've noticed it with most are those who are second or third
generation kids of forebears who hailed from the Indian subcontinent.  But
most of these students are almost entirely monoglot London-English speakers.

(For some reason the Chinese communities seem to retain their language with
greater persistence.  One of the problems we have with even 3rd generation
Chinese is that their English tends to reflect Chinese syntax - lack of
tense distinction, spasmodic marking of plurals, strange handling of
English articles etc., since in the family only Chinese - of whatever
'dialect' - is spoken.  But the languages of the Indian subcontinent seem
far less likely to survive in this way.)

We also have quite a representative section of African & Afro-Carribean
students (as well as older 'Anglo-Saxon' stock, Celts & other European
varieties).  Now 'man' has long been used as a term of address, I believe,
among AfroCarribeans.  I think the habit has simply been picked up by
youngsters of other groups and generalized.

But while some correspondents report it being used only as a mild expletive
like the older 'boy' as in 'Boy! doesn't that just take the biscuit!',
others seem to say that the use of 'man' as a general epicene term of
address is quite widespread and, I think, expressed a little surprise that
I should find it novel.  So maybe, as you suggested at the start, it is
just a 'natural' non-sexist generalization of a word which has always been
ambiguous as to sexuality  :)

Ray.