This is supplemental material to the video found here.
Again, I am fully aware that there is no one out there who will care at all about this discussion, but I do.
I have never really figured out when and where the whole idea of Common Era started from, but the PC quality of it is quite obvious. I seriously have no love at all for any ideals of political correctness. Yes, we should be aware of other people’s sensibilities and not actively just go about insulting and offending people. That does not mean, however, we should change around all we do and how we do it.
The most egregious examples in my opinion are the folk etymology ones which feminism in particular does quite a bit of, most notably the spelling of “womyn” when actually “man” is shortening of the old English word “wereman” where the “were” in it denotes a human male, much as Werewolf means a wolf man. The “man” part just denotes being part of humanity. The other one of those that, again due to my historiography predilections, particularly bugs me is “herstory” to oppose “history being his story”, when, of course, history is an Ancient Greek word, a language which surprisingly lacks both the English words of “his” AND “story”.
The straw that broke the camels back as it were for me was once at college when the Womyn’s Group on campus was having some sort of week celebrating women with daily events, no problem there, until I read the list of events and one day they we’re; having a discussion about menstruation, but they didn’t call it menstruation, they called it mynstruation. I found that immediately both highly annoying and unbelievably funny. When you’re at the point of doing things like that and herstory, changing words not because of their meaning but do to random chance of letter placement, you’ve gone off the deep end.
I also like to point out my own personal joke I find exceptionally funny about the word “womyn” and that is the choice of using the letter “y”, not because of the simple fact that it sounds nothing like the letter its trying to replace, but the simple fact that a “y” is the defining characteristic that makes a male with a thus named chromosome.
I know that was way off topic there by the end, so let’s go completely off topic a different direction. In the last two U.S.S. episodes I promoted some member of That Guy With the Glasses, so why not randomly do so again?
Uh… The Cinema Snob. Yeah, that guy’s funny, watch some of his stuff. Nothing to do with this episode, but… he has a two-parter on the movie Caligula, part 1 and part 2, so that’s somewhat related, right? Well, you can find him on That Guy With the Glasses or at his own site.