• hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    7 days ago

    At the time “man” was often used to reference the human species as a whole. Like, when they’d say something like “the dawn of man” they were specifically referring to the earliest humans regardless of gender.

    Obviously this is not particularly representative of roughly half the species, which is probably why it’s less common today. Taking that into consideration, though, TNG’s intro is arguably more colonialist than TOS.

    • cartoon meme dog@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      for most of the history of the word, “man” has generally meant all humanity, or any human.

      male men were called something like “wer”, which survives in “werewolf”.