[badfrog]

> It is not painless: it is dissonant

The dissonance should be cause for reflection and growth. Why does the gendered version sound harmonious? What does that answer say about the society that evolved our language?

> and takes another syllable.

That's just silly. If typing three additional characters causes you pain, you shouldn't be writing comments on the internet in the first place.

[Stupulous]

Dev-hours, suggested below, also sounds harmonious. Employee hours sounds okay; it's cumbersome but it seems to project the concept of hourly pay directly into my mind. Hu-years and hu-hours are physically uncomfortable. Is there anything to learn about our society from that?

I think language is something we don't really understand. Maybe you have a more refined model, but any reflection upon this for me will be complete conjecture. Language is this ancient thing that evolved in concert with our minds, optimizing for some vast array of factors. Human intervention into that process seems to always go wrong, down to US attempts to fix the spelling.

It bothers me that speaking my dialect with common definitions is not good enough. Can we not just be charitable in our interpretations of others' speech? Why do I have to dedicate cognitive load to verifying that every possible interpretation of every word is acceptable with no expectation of others meeting me in the middle, even just as far as the dictionary definition? If people's feelings matter, why don't mine?

[badfrog]

> If people's feelings matter, why don't mine?

Of course your feelings matter. I'm sure there are plenty of situations where your feelings are the most important factor to consider. But this is not one of those situations. Your feelings of minor inconvenience from being asked to use different words are less relevant than others' feelings of oppression from decades/centuries of societal biases.

[Stupulous]

This is long, and I apologize for that. I think I've said some important things though, and I'll ask you to do me the kindness of reading it. Thanks.

There's a notion in improv that when you respond only to the last thing that someone said, it's because you are in your own head and you're not listening. Additionally, it feels like you're talking down to me and others in this thread. Are those feelings invalid? It just seems like showing some respect to others should be a precursor to caring about whether a word could be misinterpreted as exclusionary, if the goal really is to make people feel less bad.

I personally devote a huge amount of time and energy to the feelings of others. I need to be doing it less, it degrades me. If I were to start caring about this on top of everything else, I would be completely dysfunctional. You call it a minor inconvenience, but if I were to accept that this is worth doing, I'd implicitly be agreeing to a thousand minor inconveniences, overthinking everything I say even more than I already do (this is a fifth draft, and look how long it has been made so I can feel I'm communicating effectively), and inevitably retreating altogether from social interactions that already give me anxiety.

Back to the subject at hand. What the word 'man' as in 'mankind', 'manpower', or 'man-hours' means to me is a dehumanized, de-individualised, notion of genetic humans working towards some end. This is a _very_ useful construct for me. A person is something else, a human individual. It is impossible for me to consider a single person, let alone thousands. People have 86 billion neurons of uncompressable complexity, and I've only got 86 billion of my own to try and grok that. This is also an incredibly useful construct for me. I can't just swap one for the other, it would be a significant long term effort to rewire all of the associations.

A better solution would be a new word to take the place of 'man' there. 'Man' already does the job, but I'm sure there are other prefixes in english that also mean human. I don't think it's a material issue, so I'm not going to devote energy to solving it. But if someone is going to tell me how to talk, they can afford to make the damn effort to find a suitable alternative instead of forcing me to adapt to the first thing that comes to mind. And when it is pointed out that it doesn't work, and it doesn't sound right, they could maybe try to figure out what is wrong with their solution, rather than assuming I'm a closed-minded closeted sexist. I don't know.