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Sunday 21 October 2018

Sunday Rest: womxn. Word Not To Use Today.

Even those who feel passionately that having the word man inside the word woman is demeaning (and who also know that, according to the people who made it up, womyn doesn't include women who started off as men) then they're still not going to be saying the word womxn today, are they.

And why is that?

Because, as far as I can discover, no one has the faintest idea how to pronounce it.*

Sunday Rest: womxn. This word was made up to include transsexuals (though the inclusion of the letter Y, as in womyn, would have done this better than an X, given the genetics of the thing. Womyn, however, is apparently already bagged by the XX-only brigade.)

The word woman is late Old English and started off as wiman, plural wimmen (which pronunciation we've kept). Before that a female adult human was called a wif or a quean. Wiman was a changed version of wifman, which meant woman-man, man standing for all human beings, as it often still does.

*Wuhmix'n sounds insultingly like vixen: but then perhaps we should be reclaiming vixen as a term of dignified respect...

...although on the whole joining an order of Trappists might be easiest.

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