[ExI] Gender-Neutral Side Note

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 09/11/2025 16:01, spike at rainier66.com wrote:
>
> *From:*extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On 
> Behalf Of *Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
> *…*
>
> >…But against that is the decision to replace "...where no man..." 
> with "...where no one...". Again, no great objection, at least it does 
> make sense and doesn't sound artificial, but it still tends to draw 
> the attention to these silly 'gender issues' that get people so riled 
> up, and it's unnecessary. There are more important things to worry about.
>
> -- 
> Ben
>
>
> >…Ja, that and they fixed the split infinitive by switching to “to go 
> boldly” replacing “to boldly go” tossing us grammar nazis a bone.  But 
> it also makes us realize that eliminating the split infinitive was not 
> a real improvement.  Picard’s revised introduction still doesn’t 
> eliminate the Columbus problem.  When I was first told Columbus 
> discovered the Americas, I knew that was false: there were already 
> people here, plenty of them.  Where Picard went had “ones” already 
> there, the Vulcans, the beloved Feringi (I really relate to them for 
> some odd reason) the Klingons and so forth.
>
> Better would have been “…to go boldly where no earth-evolved human has 
> gone before…”
>
> spike
>

Hm. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

The thing is, spike, "to go boldly" might be more gramatically correct, 
but it lacks the resonance of "to boldly go". It just sounds weaker. So 
I prefer the ungrammatical version, for its dramatic effect. I expect 
this was why it was originally chosen (for the dramatic effect, not my 
preference).

And this is where "man" works well, too: "To boldly go where no man has 
gone before" = "To (dramatic emphasis) /boldly/ go where no 
(gender-neutral, but species-specific, hu-)man has gone before".

Re. discovering, you have to realise that probably very few of the 
discoveries we have made throughout history have been correctly 
assigned. We like neat stories about some lone genius making a 
world-changing discovery, but it rarely happens like that. It takes lots 
of time and lots of people. Then some chancer takes the credit. Then 
there's the difficulty of properly defining "discovered". If I point out 
that Leif Erikson discovered the americas hundreds of years before 
Columbus, you'll point out that actually, some unknown proto-asians 
discovered it, thousands of years before him. Then I'll argue that some 
mammoths probably discovered the place, millions of years before /that/. 
Then ...

-- 
Ben

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