Want a shock? A college professor just displayed towering ignorance about the English language, and a student is suffering the consequences!
According to Shanna Nelson of Campus Reform, Cailin Jeffers, a student majoring in English at Northern Arizona University, told Campus Reform that English Professor and “President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow” Dr. Anne Scott marked her down for using the word “mankind” on a paper.
Instead, this professor of English stressed that she wanted students to use the “gender neutral” word “humanity”.
I would be negligent, as a professor who is running a class about the human condition and the assumptions we make about being ‘human,’ if I did not also raise this issue of gendered language and ask my students to respect the need for gender-neutral language.
Sadly, this class is not about ignorance of the English language, because, if it were, “Distinguished Teaching Fellow” Scott could teach that very well. She does not want her students to use the “gender-heavy” “mankind” because, of course, it has those three evil letters “m”, “a”, and “n”, otherwise known as “The M Word."
Far be it for an outside observer who uses the same language, but one might think that a “Distinguished” professor in English might be familiar with the linguistic origins of the words she uses, and for which her politically correct attitude arbitrarily draws an incorrect distinction. One might actually expect a college professor of English to know that “human” is no less connected to the word “man” than “mankind." Both words stem from the Latin “homo," for, wait for it…
MAN.
Yeah. Hu-man.
Originlate Middle English humaine, from Old French humain(e ), from Latin humanus, from homo ‘man, human being.’
But rather than bother knowing the actual subject of English, this brilliantine prof shoves “social justice warrior” thinking down the throats of students by adding:
The words we use matter very much, or else teachers would not be making an issue of this at all, and the MLA would not be making recommendations for gender-neutral language at the national level.
And there is the rub.
In that last phrase, Professor Scott reveals the larger scope of the problem. She mentions the dreaded “MLA”.
For those who have not been in college for a while, “MLA” stands for “Modern Language Association," and is one of the two prevailing writing standards to which professors in the U.S. usually order students to conform when submitting a paper to the great Delphic gods of the ivory tower.
The fact that the MLA is pushing for the same kind of nonsensical word tyranny as Scott, without even recognizing the identical linguistic heritage of its “preferred gender neutral word” is, frankly, beyond stunning. It is insulting.
But this is to be expected on college campuses, where post-modernist, collectivist deconstructionism and semiotics have ruled the roost for decades, allowing leftists to label as an insult any term, idea, or person that/who does not agree with the agenda.
This is the state of academia today. It is not a rare exception. It is mainstream, all the way to the MLA.
Kudos to Cailin Jeffers for going public with it, and revealing this example of academic ignorance. And shame on Professor Scott and the MLA for marching in lock-step to the drums of ignorance.