Why Man?

[Adrian Hester]

But it should be clear, simply through your own introspection, that you exert some additional mental effort to learn longer words. Maybe not a lot, but some--enough to make a real difference when you need to learn thousands and thousands of words.

Which only means that the word man will be learned a few years earlier than humanity.

And it should also be clear, through simple self-observation of how much your mouth moves, that, under normal conditions, you exert more effort to say longer words as opposed to shorter ones.

This only serves to explain why we'd use man instead of humanity now in conversation. However, if you just think about how the word man came to be used in both senses in the first place, it makes no sense by your argument. In Old English, you had distinct words for 'man,' 'woman,' and 'mankind': wer, wif, and mann. (Indeed, you also had guma 'man' and quen 'woman.') Mann is a bit longer than wer (the two n's were both pronounced) and had a distinct meaning, so why replace wer with a longer word with a distinct meaning? And it's obvious that the difference in meaning between 'male human being' and 'human being' is important--English speakers have since put together an even longer word mankind for the second meaning and borrowed a number of words from Latin and French to express it (humanity, person, people), and even cobbled together some set phrases (human beings, the human race). All of these are centuries-old and quite a bit longer than man, so presumably it's important to distinguish the two meanings of the word--and so presumably it was stupid to replace wer by mann in the first place. (And the same thing happened in other languages. Latin homo 'person' is longer than vir 'man,' especially if you look at the non-subject forms: hominem / virum in the direct object, for example. Yet homo replaced vir in all of the Romance languages.) Obviously there's something going on besides trying to exert less energy.

[DavidOdden]

I can't do the observing for you. So, I think I'm done explaining this for now.

I'm feeling a lot more mellow about this now, after a couple of days. All I can say is that I am disappointed at the level of rationalism that you exhibited in that argument, the profound contempt for the facts of reality, and the adherence to an epistemology which elevates a particular version of primacy of consciousness, namely the credo of the a priori, over actual existence and its perception. So I won't be asking you to clarify anything further, since it would not increase my knowledge context at all.

[MisterSwig]

Which only means that the word man will be learned a few years earlier than humanity.

Not necessarily. It depends on which words a child is taught and in which order. My theory pertains to why people use one word versus another with the same exact meaning. But you first have to learn both words in order to then choose which one to use in a given situation. If you are only taught the word "DVD", then you will never refer to your "digital video disk" player. It will always be your DVD player. People make use of abbreviations and acronyms usually for the same reason they make use of shorter words: they are easier to learn, remember, say, and write.

. . . Obviously there's something going on besides trying to exert less energy.

I'm not claiming that word economy is the only factor determining how we use words. I've already said that we keep some words around for other purposes such as writing poetry or whatever. Man has free will. So, he might use a particular word for a variety of reasons of his choosing. However, I believe that, in general, people use shorter words versus longer ones with the same meaning because it is more efficient and thus easier.

Ask yourself: Why do you use "DVD" versus "digital video disk"? Now that you know about "digital video disk", are you going to start using it all the time? Assuming you aren't, then why not? Is it because people will look at you funny? Or, maybe it's simply because "DVD" is much shorter and simpler to say? Well, that is the same basic principle we apply when dealing with shorter words that mean the same thing as a longer one, such as using "man" or "hippo" instead of "humanity" or "hippopotamus". It's also the same principle behind forming contractions like "don't" and "it's". It's the same principle behind forming elisions like "goin'" or "c'mon". It's the same basic principle behind many of our grammatical tools. Such tools can, if used properly and in context, make language more efficient.

[Cogito]

Ask yourself: Why do you use "DVD" versus "digital video disk"?

Because it's Digital Versatile Disc