In 1990 the comedian George Carlin memorably mocked the tendency to replace the word man with person. “Little kids would be afraid of the ‘boogie-person,’ ” Carlin scoffed. “They’d look up in the sky and see the ‘person in the moon.’ Guys would say, ‘Come back here and fight like a person,’ and we’d all sing ‘For It’s a Jolly Good Person.’ That’s the kind of thing you would hear on Late Night with David Letterperson!”
Nearly three decades later, the joke grows, shall we say, progressively less absurd. Speaking at a forum at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau took a question about government regulations on volunteer organizations. “Maternal love is the love that’s going to change the future of mankind,” the young woman was saying when she was interrupted by the premier. “We like to say peoplekind,” he said, hand waving, “not necessarily mankind, because it’s more inclusive.”
Trudeau received condign ridicule on social media for this priggish and totally unnecessary interruption (which he later, unpersuasively, claimed was a botched joke). For one thing, is peoplekind even a word? Surely he meant the slightly less dissonant humankind.
But maybe he has a point. We admit that the term mankind and related descriptors—especially he and him for a person of either sex—do raise hackles among a certain class of people. Perhaps we should start correcting ourselves, if for no other reason than to avoid being publicly humiliated by sanctimonious politicians. Unfortunately, though, our language and literature are shot through with man and mankind and associated language. We think for instance of the second epistle of Pope’s Essay on Man, which begins:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
“The proper study of peoplekind is people” just wouldn’t have worked. At an only slightly lower literary level, it wouldn’t have sounded quite right for Paul Simon to sing:
Maybe I’m laughing my way to disaster
Maybe my race has been run.
Maybe I’m blind to the fate of peoplekind,
But what can be done?
And it’s hard to imagine Neil Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface and suddenly exhibiting woke sensitivities: “That’s one small step for a person and one giant leap for peoplekind.”
Well, never mind. If progressive politicos and academics keep insisting on people for man, we’re not going to lose sleep over it. From George Carlin to your humble Scrapbook, it’s always good for some cheap jokes.
