Gov. Sanders cites an example from a Department of Health memo and claims other uses of what she calls “nonsense terms” have been reported to her office.
Edit: Expanding on this as some people seem to be confused…
The article is only about the etymology of the word:
But the question of where the word woman comes from is also of interest, since, as is so often the case with everyday words whose etymologies we take for granted, the origins of the term ‘woman’ contains several surprising details.
The etymological fallacy is thinking that the etymology relates to the contemporary definition, which is what the commenter was doing in confusing the etymology of woman or man as being somehow connected to its meaning.
In general, the commenter was mistaken, as while it is true that a number of stories in the OT were likely based on earlier concepts of neutral or multiple genders (such as the example I originally gave), from the earliest Hebrew onwards there was literally no way of representing it.
So you ended up with later reinterpretation of passages with binary gender like the Genesis 1 example as having related to a hermaphroditic original man (Philio and the later Naassenes) given it was in the image of what was supposedly a singular God but rendered male and female both. Whereas what’s more likely was this passage dated back to the days of a divine power couple of Yahweh and his wife which was later reworked into a monotheistic form without updating the creation of men and women in their images.
But the topic of binary gender representation in the language is fairly broadly discussed and is distinct from what the commenter is trying to represent as being similar in languages with neutral gender representations with some bizarre appeal to etymology.
I suspect it was even the driving concept in the 1st century behind the comments about “make the male and female into a single one” in the Gospel of Thomas saying 22, which ironically still elsewhere referred to the ‘Father’ as opposed to ‘Parent.’ (Aramaic was also a binary gendered language.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy
Edit: Expanding on this as some people seem to be confused…
The article is only about the etymology of the word:
The etymological fallacy is thinking that the etymology relates to the contemporary definition, which is what the commenter was doing in confusing the etymology of woman or man as being somehow connected to its meaning.
In general, the commenter was mistaken, as while it is true that a number of stories in the OT were likely based on earlier concepts of neutral or multiple genders (such as the example I originally gave), from the earliest Hebrew onwards there was literally no way of representing it.
So you ended up with later reinterpretation of passages with binary gender like the Genesis 1 example as having related to a hermaphroditic original man (Philio and the later Naassenes) given it was in the image of what was supposedly a singular God but rendered male and female both. Whereas what’s more likely was this passage dated back to the days of a divine power couple of Yahweh and his wife which was later reworked into a monotheistic form without updating the creation of men and women in their images.
But the topic of binary gender representation in the language is fairly broadly discussed and is distinct from what the commenter is trying to represent as being similar in languages with neutral gender representations with some bizarre appeal to etymology.
I suspect it was even the driving concept in the 1st century behind the comments about “make the male and female into a single one” in the Gospel of Thomas saying 22, which ironically still elsewhere referred to the ‘Father’ as opposed to ‘Parent.’ (Aramaic was also a binary gendered language.)
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