Essential Essay No. 1: Was Paul Revere a Minute Person?

At the cusp of--and in response to--the language takeover by the Politically Correct in the early 1970s, Jacques Barzun wrote the following seminal essay. As is the case with most of his writings, the passing of time has cast this essay's prophetic incisiveness into ever sharper relief. In other words, if Demi Moore ever wins a "best actor" award for portraying a "fire fighter" on screen, we can't say we weren't warned.

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Early last spring I received as member of a large and elderly professional association a committee report signed with two names. Each was identified as Co-chairperson of the committee. The designation was not then new to me, but for some reason the pathos of attaching such a label to live fellow workers struck me with fresh force, and in my sadness I began to reflect on the cause.

Obviously, the reason for using person was to avoid man, now felt to be the sign of an arrogant imperialism. And in the background, no doubt, was the further wish to get rid of sex reference altogether, to confirm equality by insisting on our common humanness. With the last intention no one will quarrel. The only question is whether it can be served so usefully by terminology that language has to be wrenched out of shape, on top of being misunderstood.

For the pity of the matter is that man, in chairman and elsewhere, still means person, as it does etymologically. As far back as the Sanskrit manus, the root man means human being, with no implication of sex. The German Mann and Mensch, the Latin homo (from which derives the name human that we so passionately seek) originally denote the kind of creature we all are. Homo Sapiens means male and female alike. For the male sort, the words were vir in Latin, wer in Old English (as in wergeld, the fine for a crime). Woman is the contraction of wif-man, the she-person.

To be sure, confusion set in early, as one would expect, and in the evolution of the Germanic and Romance languages Mann, Mensch, man, homo, homme, and vir, as well as wif, wife, weib, and woman, usurped one or another's place. Virtue, for example, lost its exclusively male tone and became a pre-eminently female attribute. The point to remember is that the meanings switch back and forth, not just one way. In modern German man sagt, meaning they say, is a common singular for both genders. In French, the on of the corresponding on dit is homo whittled down and flouting homme by meaning either he or she. In English, man and woman acquired their present differentiation without depriving man of its universal, unisex meaning. As an act of Parliament in 1878 reminded the world in platitudinous terms, "man embraces woman." Unless limited by context, mankind means and has always meant humanity entire. It includes the child, who is--in the other sense of the words--neither man nor woman. Tribal names--Norsemen, Norman, German, Allemand (Alle Männer)--are likewise inclusive by their very form.

The present urge to tamper with these familiar notions and nuances is foolishly misdirected. A colleague tells me that he recently gave a new departmental secretary a book note to type, in a great hurry at the end of the day. The young woman was most obliging and pleasant about it and turned out clean copy in a few minutes. My friend took it home to proofread and found it perfect, except for a mysterious gap at the end. A three-letter space had been left after the puzzling word spokes. The next day he gingerly asked the girl to explain. She replied that she belonged to a group that had vowed never to type in full the words chairman, spokesman, and the like. Does the embargo by these ernest souls extend to woman?

No one denies that words are powerful symbols of feeling and attitude and, as such, solid parts of the social structure. That is why from time to time it seems as if to change the structure one need only change the words. The trouble is that the effort can never be thorough and effectual. Language is too subtle, and the force of common speech, set in its course by the generations, sweeps the censor away like a twig in a torrent. Suppose you get rid of chairman and spokesman by dint of not typing them. What will you do with fireman, minute man, Frenchman? "She phoned and the firepersons came." "Paul Revere was a minute person." Honestly! As for the Frenchperson, some fool will want to know whether "it" was a he or a she, while another will mutilate dragoman, mistaking it for a native compound with man like the rest.

The esthetic sense, not to say the art of literature, is implicated in this silly game. Person is not a word to cherish and ubiquitize. Who does not feel that in its most general sense, which asserts anonymity, the word is disagreeably hoity-toity: "There is a person at the door"? In the classic English novel the young person holds an ambiguous place--always a she, but now unsavory, now requiring protection. The very etymology of person is in doubt, though in mid-career at Rome it certainly had associations with the emptiness of a mask--persona. In French, indeed, it often means nobody: "Who's there?"--"Personne." Compare, in American speech, "certain persons believe ..." with the vernacular: "some people think...."

The advertiser's conception of the person ("let us personalize your paper towels"--as if your initials were your self) is another reason for putting the word in frequent quarantine. Let loose, it tempts to such absurdities as: "I want to enjoy my personal life," "he sold his personal library," and to the appalling compliment: "She's a very real person." In any case, sound and length unsuit it for spontaneous use in dozens of ordinary phrases: "Yes, the river's dammed; it's a personmade lake." "She had to be personhandled to get her out of the bar."

It is no new discovery that in its ways of marking gender English is capricious and inconvenient. Perhaps it was a good thing to drop the gender of nouns (though reference by pronoun would often benefit from its presence), but it was not sensible to keep gender in the possessives without allowing one of them to indicate either or both genders indifferently. Just as we miss a man sagt or on dit and must resort to the plural they, so we are commonly driven to: "Has everybody got their ticket?" To use his-or-her (her-or-his) as often as it would be needed in a single sentence or paragraph is quite impracticable.

This is not to say that the use of gender words in English has stood still. Notice it and its in Shakespeare. At some point since Wordsworth wrote "A little child, what should it know of death?" a preference developed for referring to children as he or she--to "personalize" them. And in that same interval we have laudably got rid of poetess and authoress, as well as of the short-lived doctress and paintress, which some early feminists demanded as their right. Who can tell whether the road to equality lies through signalizing sex or ignoring it? If credit is wanted, then women workers and doers must be readily known by their titles, and poetess returns. But if "minority" feeling is to merge in a unisex psyche, then not even "the way of a man with a maid" dare be mentioned: the way is the same for both.


In the person binge of today this uncertainty remains, fot Hannah and Harold still give away the co-chairpersons' sexual affiliation. Will the next move be toward first names amputated so as to be undetectable, on the model of Ms? If English is thus in need of revision and reform (as Strindberg said of the multiplication table) the task ahead is formidable. Will it not be necessary to ostracize virtue because of its masculine taint? Will not men denounce the inequality of calling all ships "she" and women the injustice of employing the officer known as the "ship's husband"? And what of the naval she which is a man-of-war? Warperson?

Nor will it end with the unhappy English tongue. Sex is a source of chaos in language generally, as it is in life. German makes mädchen unpardonably neuter, considers weib a low word and substitutes frau, though it is surely "das ewig-weibliche"--the eternal feminine--that draws us upward (a quite different thing from running after frau or fräulein), to say nothing of the weird form and sense of frauenzimmer. In French personne is masculine when it means nobody but feminine when it turns around and refers to someone, in which sense it can be applied to a male and then qualified by an adjective in the feminine. Such anomalies abound; they exist in all modern languages as they do in ancient Greek and Latin.

All this insinuates the idea that language cannot be turned at will into a sort of garrulous algebra under the rule of strictness and fixity. Even in algebra one changes the sign, and hence the value, as one moves the terms around. The same adaptability, but far wider, must continue to prevail among words if we are to have a tolerable idiom and the enjoyment that in good hands it can produce. Make childish war on accepted designations, try to force the use of person to suppress gender, and sooner or later free speech will find a way; dire need will inspire dreadful revivals--say, female as a noun, in the manner of early nineteenth-century fiction. I see no gain for the lexicon of human dignity either in the prospect pf this she-person, with her irrelevant -male and her masculine companion, "an individual," or in the present peopling of the world with the blank neuter called person.

In short, within the great treasury of terms and their combinations, all of equal and emancipated human beings must accept the rough with the smooth, the convenient and the inconvenient, the direct and the roundabout. We must understand that the "brotherhood of man" does not exclude our beloved sisters; that the potent formula Liberty, Equality, Fr----- cannot be revised to end with either Sorority or Personality; that mankind in modern usage is not the opposite of womankind as menfolk is of womenfolk; that we are all fellowman and fellowmen together; and that while poetess is offensive and doctress ridiculous, actress is here to stay.

Even if the banded typists of the world should, to a woman, withhold the last syllable of spokesman, their success would hardly legislate the reforms they are after. Important goals must be fought for on their own grounds. Demand equal pay for equal work and the world will come to it. But it was not by the compulsory use of citoyen and citoyenne after 1789 that democratic manners were established in France. There is more democracy under the Fifth Republic with monsieur and madame than there was with that affectation under the Committee of Public Safety.

I conclude, on the score of history, etymology, and Sprachgefühl, that "Madame chairman" is a correct and decent appellation. No one until recently ever saw in the phrase any paradox, incongruity, or oppugnancy between terms. It is consistent with common sense and perfect equity: the man in it denotes either sex, and therefore the key word means precisely chairperson. For my part, I shall continue to use it unless stopped by the chair herself, when I will duly defer to authority with the compromise "Madame la Chaise"--that at the risk of being in turn called Père Lachaise* and buried there with full semantic honors.

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*A cemetery in Paris.