[vacri]

It's not a competition.

Also, does your quipper think that women aren't important? I always find it amusing when people wax philosophical about equality whilst retreating into sexist terminology to do so. Instead of 'poor men', 'the poor' or 'poor people' works to the same effect.

[sliverstorm]

OLPC was created by a man (hence 'rich man'), and rich man/poor man is a more powerful literary device than rich man/the poor.

[vacri]

I'm aware of all that. I didn't say boo to 'rich man', because it is driven by Negroponte. I recognized the literary device with 'wax philosophical'. It's still someone trying to play the oneupmanship game on equality while at the same time perpetuating sexism. It's a shitty thing to do to merely 'sound cool' - selling out ideals for demagoguery.

English is a wonderfully flexible language and there are a dozen different ways to say the same thing here. Hand-waving away the hypocrisy in that statement as being a more powerful (barely, at that) literary device is just being lazy.

I'd also counter that the proper literary device is 'rich man/poor mAn', not 'rich man/poor mEn'. A small but meaningful difference.