Oh, that’s a bit sexist. GerMANy. Women and gender miscellaneous beings live there too you know. Can you please refer to it as Gerpersony from now on? Would hate to be triggered when I’m not near a safe space. Thanks.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold...

This is just the sort of s*** that some of them would come out with with a straight face, though, isn't it?

Never mind that "man" is a Germanic one and thar "Germany" cones from Germania which is Latin. The Germans' own word for their country and people comes from PIE *theudo "people, nation" (moderh German deutsch). Funnily enough this root is cognate with the one in Proto-Celtic that gives us the modern perjorative Scots slang word for a Highlander, teuchter.

A PC warrior's understanding of the above of course would be zero.

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any recommendations on a pub near selhurst to watch the match? visiting from USA - cheers!

Apeople to that.

When are we playing Personchester United?

I'm sure we'll personage the linguistic stuff. It'll be illegal to peopletion anything that's gender specific and we'll have an ombudsperson to oversee it all. Woe betide anyone who tries to personipulate him. What? Oh, sorry officer or officeress I didn't realise...

I noticed BTW when in Austria a few years ago that the PC brigade had clamped down on the masculine / feminine distinction in agent nouns in German with some bizarre results. In German many (but not all) agent nouns (that is doers of things) are masculine and end in -er, and if the person is female, you add -in on the end of that and make it feminine. Now if you have a group of people like teachers, say, you would normally use the masculine and being a sensible German speaker you would know that grammatical gender had nothing to do with natural gender and say that the masculine imported the feminine. But now seemingly you have to provide for both. So you not only have to use the feminine form but you also capitalise the I in the feminine ending, ignoring the fact that it's in the middle of the word where you never, ever otherwise use a capital letter (unless I suppose you're writing computer code). "LehrerInnen verlangen bessere Belohnung", "teachers demand better salaries". Bonkers, bonkers, bonkers.

Apparently they are now trying to make you use frau as an impersonal pronoun alongside or instead of man, which is the usual (non-gender-specific) word for "one" or "you" in an impersonal sense, like the French on. Man darf hier nicht rauchen, "you can't smoke here". The fact that man has nothing to do with der Mann (man) seems not to dampen their spirit.

Stop press: just been looking at Wikipedia and it looks as if there are even more ludicrous ideas than the above being proposed. Lehrer*innen. I mean FFS.

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In memory of the late Eva?

Looks like this one ticks both boxes:

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