At a Tuesday night city council meeting, Berkeley (California) became the first city in America to eliminate the gendered connotations of words like “manhole” in the city municipal code.
No longer will the streets of fair Berkeley be dotted with manholes, nary a womanhole or nonbinaryhole in sight. With Tuesday night’s vote, they have all been transmuted into “maintenance holes,” that highest, hardest glass manhole-cover finally shattered.
Gendered professional terms like “fireman,” “firewoman” and “craftsman” will be swapped out for gender-neutral substitutes like “firefighter” and “craftspeople.” “Heirs” will become “beneficiaries,” a “sportsman” is now a “hunter,” and an “ombudsman” is now just an “ombuds.” The estimated cost of the revisions is a modest $600.
It was approved Tuesday night as a consent item without council discussion or public comment, Berkeleyside’s Emilie Raguso reported.
THE FULL LIST OF WORD CHANGES:
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28 Responses
Glad they got their priorities completed.
Now let’s get back to address the less important stuff, like homelessness.
This law is subject to personipulation.
Anyway to me it is still going to be known as a mantenance hole sorry persontenance hole
Whatever!
Will they stop selling Manishewitz in Berkeley?
Ani Tapuach, selling Manishewitz should be illegal everywhere.
Actually it sounds clever, since “Maintenance hole” is too long, so people will call them “Manholes” for short.
Oh man — I mean Oh person
Even the trans community only identify themselves by one gender. Why would “he that became she” care to have gendered terms if right now hes a she?
In New York, will Manhattan be changed to Personhattan?
Thank Gd we solved all our problems only this needed to be cleaned up.
Now we are a just caring society. BH 🙂
A few days ago was 50 years since we landed on the moon. When I re-heard Armstrong’s famous message of “One large step for man…..” I was thinking that nowadays he would be bashed by the 2020 Democratic Candidates, NBC, CNN, and CBS for being sexist.
Go ahead and laugh but let’s admit that we play the same game but differently. In “frum English,” we flush feminine pronouns down the personhole, as in “On Shabbos one must be careful to cover his light switches.”
This is getting sick?
Maybe this is getting silly.
Better than womanhole
It’s sick out there and getting sicker.
More Leitzanus:
In the Declaration of Independence it says: “…all MEN are created equal…”
Will the current Supreme Court declare this historic document unconstitutional?
i just received a personuscript from my personager. i like to play with my humandolin. my favorite fruit is humangos. i was just gonna go get my nails done by the personicurist. the police police officer put on the humanacles. I actually heard from the spokesperson that there was a very important statesperson who was friends with a fisherperson. I had the handyhuman around at my home the other day. i better speak to the milkperson to cancel my order for tomorrow etc. etc.
In the NBA they started calling an owner of a team a governor, because the word owner may be offensive to blacks, I mean people of color. I predict in the not too distant future that Hebrew will be considered racist.
The city council found the wrong recipients for the $600 charge – instead of paying the webmaster of the city’s website and the printer to redo their forms and stationery, the $600 would have been better spent to have a psychiatrist visit the city council meeting in order for the council to get counciled.
So what? What do we care about what the welt is doing on such a trivial issue? There’s no mitzvah to jump on whatever victimization bandwagon the non-Jewish (and even Jewish) talk radio hosts jump on. Is this going to prevent us from doing mitzvos? We’re just training ourselves to be leitzanim, so when a real issue appears, like the New York State interference in yeshiva education, it’s just one more excuse for making clever snarky jokes.
We have enough issues of our own that we have to take care of. Let the TV-radio ratings wannabes do their thing without us.
whats sadder is that this stuff seeps into our own lexicon
To A Letz you can’t say personhattan because the son in person may be offensive. We cant say humanhattan because of the word man. I propose we call it Hattan. Eventually someone will be offended with any word you may use.
I guess they are not huMAN!
Midwest2,
All of this will be relevant to the Frum communities as soon as the gender confused people find out about separate swimming in the JCC.
These bullies are ruining the country and everyone is too afraid of them to stop it.
When I saw the huge number of comments (compersonts?), I had to look. Most of them are actually funny.
Wo-man!
To Huju the one I wrote about the NBA banning the word owner isn’t a joke. This is their new policy.
(Please do not post this.)
Dear Moderator:
Please remove the crass, inappropriate comment by laughing @ July 18, 2019 12:54 pm
>>> Better than womanhole
Oh no!
What’s gonna be with our beloved Lady Bugs?
They’re not on the list of word changes.
Do they plan on just exterminating them?